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Short Biosketch

I received a BA from Reed College in philosophy (1966) and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in linguistics (1972), and then held successive faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MIT, and Stanford. I am currently Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita in the Department of Linguistics and a senior researcher at Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).

My research uses theoretical models to explore how languages vary and the cognitive sources of this variation. I have collaborated with linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists to develop and test probabilistic models of how grammar varies in individuals and groups of people over space and time. I am one of the original designers and developers of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). At Stanford's Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) I created the Spoken Syntax Laboratory to provide resources for collaborative work on syntax using multiple sources of evidence and modern statistical models. It has been a base for my research collaborations with local and international colleagues and students, and where I have been principal investigator of several projects under National Science Foundation and other awards.

I have been named to the National Academy of Sciences (2023), received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Computational Linguistics (2016), and elected President of the Linguistic Society of America (1999). I am also honored to be a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, Inaugural Fellow of the LSA, Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, Fellow of the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, and Guggenheim Fellow, and to have held an Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury (Christchurch), an external Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies, and a holder of the International Chair of Quantitative and Experimental Linguistics at Labex Empirical Foundations of Linguistics in Paris. I have lectured in the Edward Sapir Professorship of the LSA, the Nijmegen Lectures, the Vilem Mathesius Lecture Series (Charles University, Prague), and was invited to give the Roman Jakobson lecture to the Prague Circle in 1998. I was a member of the Usage Panel for the American Heritage Dictionary.

Personal Essays

Joan Bresnan. 2016. Acceptance speech of the Association of Computational Linguistics 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award: "Linguistics: The Garden and the Bush" in Computational Linguistics 42(4):599--617. The MIT Press. Errata

Joan Bresnan. 2011. "A Voyage into Uncertainty", published as "Linguistic uncertainty and the knowledge of knowledge". In Thinking Reed. Centenial Essays by Graduates of Reed College., a volume of essays by Reed College alumni on the occasion of the college's centenary, edited by Roger Porter and Robert Reynolds and published by Reed College, Portland, Oregon, pp. 69--75.

"I began to realize that we theoretical linguists had no privileged way of distinguishing the possible formal patterns of a language from the merely probable. Many of the kinds of sentences reported by theorists to be ungrammatical are actually used quite grammatically in rare contexts. Authentic examples can be found in very large collections of language use, such as the World Wide Web. [...] Moreover, judgments of ungrammaticality are often unstable and can be manipulated simply by raising or lowering the probability of the context. Most remarkably, language users have powerful predictive capacities, which can be measured using statistical models of spontaneous language use. From all these discoveries I have come to believe that our implicit knowledge of language has been vastly underestimated by theoretical linguistics of the kind I had practiced."