Bresnan, Joan
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Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at
Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
. She is best known as one of the architects (with
Ronald Kaplan Ronald M. Kaplan (born 1946) has served as a vice president at Amazon.com and chief scientist for Amazon Search ( A9.com). He was previously vice president and distinguished scientist at Nuance Communications and director of Nuance' Natural La ...
) of the theoretical framework of
lexical functional grammar Lexical functional grammar (LFG) is a constraint-based grammar framework in theoretical linguistics. It posits several parallel levels of syntactic structure, including a phrase structure grammar representation of word order and constituency, an ...
.


Career and research

After graduating from
Reed College Reed College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, E ...
in 1966 with a degree in philosophy, Bresnan earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1972 at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
, where she studied with
Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...
. In the early and mid 1970s, her work focused on complementation and
wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...
constructions within
transformational grammar In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) was the earliest model of grammar proposed within the research tradition of generative grammar. Like current generative theories, it treated grammar as a sys ...
, and she frequently took positions at odds with those espoused by Chomsky. Her dissatisfaction with transformational grammar led her to collaborate with Kaplan on a new theoretical framework, lexical-functional grammar, or LFG. A volume of papers written in the new framework and edited by Bresnan, entitled ''The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations'', appeared in 1982. Since then, Bresnan's work has focused on LFG analyses of various phenomena, primarily in English,
Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀), or Ntu languages are a language family of about 600 languages of Central Africa, Central, Southern Africa, Southern, East Africa, Eastern and Southeast Africa, South ...
, and
Australian languages The Indigenous languages of Australia number in the hundreds, the precise number being quite uncertain, although there is a range of estimates from a minimum of around 250 (using the technical definition of 'language' as non-mutually intellig ...
. She has also worked on analyses in
optimality theory Optimality theory (frequently abbreviated OT) is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the optimal satisfaction of conflicting constraints. OT differs from other approaches to phonological analysis, which ty ...
, and has pursued statistical approaches to linguistics. She has a strong interest in
linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...
, which has influenced the development of LFG. Additional research interests of hers include dynamics of probabilistic grammar and empirical foundations of syntax. In pursuit of the latter, she established Stanford's Spoken Syntax Lab.


Honors

Joan Bresnan was a
Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon individuals who have demonstrated d ...
in 1975-6 and a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1982-3. She served as the
president President most commonly refers to: *President (corporate title) * President (education), a leader of a college or university *President (government title) President may also refer to: Arts and entertainment Film and television *'' Præsident ...
of the
Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...
in 1999. She was named a
Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned or professional societies, the term refers ...
in 2006. She was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...
in 2004. She was honored in August 2005 with a
festschrift In academia, a ''Festschrift'' (; plural, ''Festschriften'' ) is a book honoring a respected person, especially an academic, and presented during their lifetime. It generally takes the form of an edited volume, containing contributions from the h ...
entitled ''Architectures, Rules, and Preferences: A Festschrift for Joan Bresnan'', published by CSLI Publications in December 2007. During periods in 2009-2012 she visited Freiburg for collaborative research as an External Fellow at the
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies The Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) is the international research college of the University of Freiburg, Germany. The institute was initially part of the university's proposal for funding in the Excellence Initiative in 2007, an in ...
. She was elected a Fellow of the
Cognitive Science Society The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society prom ...
in 2012. She was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the
British Academy The British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies is the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and the social sciences. It was established in 1902 and received its royal charter in the sa ...
in 2015. In 2016, she was selected as the
Association for Computational Linguistics The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is a scientific and professional organization for people working on natural language processing. Its namesake conference is one of the primary high impact conferences for natural language proce ...
Lifetime Achievement Award winner. In 2023, she was elected to the
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...
.


Teaching

Bresnan has also taught at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...
and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a member of the faculty.


Selected publications

Bresnan wrote an informal and somewhat humorous account of her career and works for her ACL Lifetime Achievement Award. As of December 16, 2018, Stanford lists forty-four books and papers that Bresnan has either authored or co-authored since 1996. However, she has been publishing since well over a decade before that. An incomplete selection of her particularly influential works appears below. * 1982 Kaplan, Ronald and Joan Bresnan, "Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation," in J. Bresnan, ed., The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Chapter 4, The MIT Press (1982) (pp. 173–281). * 1987 Bresnan, Joan and Sam A. Mchombo, "Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chichewa," Language LXIII.4 (December 1987) (pp. 741–782) * 1996 Austin, Peter and Joan Bresnan, "Nonconfigurationality in Australian Aboriginal Languages," Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 14 (pp. 215–268) * 2001 Bresnan, Joan, Shipra, Dingare, and Christopher D. Manning. "Soft Constraints Mirror Hard Constraints: Voice and Person in English and Lummi," in proceedings of the LFG '01 Conference, University of Hong Kong. On-line, CSLI Publications: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/6/lfg01.html. * 2007 Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina, and R. Harald Baayen. "Predicting the Dative Alternation." In Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, ed. by G. Bouma, I. Kraemer and J. Zwarts. Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, Amsterdam, pp. 69–94. * 2007 "Is Syntactic Knowledge Probabilistic? Experiments with the English Dative Alternation." In Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base, Series: Studies in Generative Grammar, ed. by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 75–96.


References


External links


Joan Bresnan's home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bresnan, Joan 1945 births Living people Syntacticians Reed College alumni Stanford University Department of Linguistics faculty Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences alumni American women linguists Linguistic Society of America presidents Corresponding fellows of the British Academy Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences