Curriculum Vitae
Short Biosketch and Research Interests
I am Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities, Emerita in the Department of Linguistics and a senior researcher at Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) at Stanford University. I earned my BA from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in Philosophy and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Linguistics. I held faculty positions at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and MIT before joining the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University in 1983. From 1983 to 1992 I was also a Member of the Research Staff of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory at the Xerox Corporation Palo Alto Research Center.
I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. I am a former President of the Linguistic Society of America and an Inaugural Fellow of the LSA. My awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Computational Linguistics, a Fellowship at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
My research focuses on broadening the empirical foundations of Syntax---the skeletal structure of language---by synthesizing multiple sources of quantitative experimental evidence together with qualitative linguistic judgments, in order to understand how language is cognitively represented. I am one of the original designers and developers of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), a formal grammar system which has allowed both flexible, typologically diverse linguistic descriptions for field linguistics, and computational implementations and extensions to theoretical models of exemplar-based syntax, optimality-theoretic syntax, and probabilistic grammars.
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."--passage selected by Simonetta Vietri, from Bresnan (2011).
The Photo
The photo* shows me delivering a plenary talk in Zurich at the third ISLE (International Society for the Linguistics of English), held in August of 2014. I am wearing a black "bike-love" t-shirt with a magenta heart shaped from bicycle chain links. I was an avid cyclist. My partner Marianne flew from home with our two travel bicycles to meet me after the conference and we took a train to Geneva to start a cycling tour from Geneva to Interlaken.
This same photo was displayed at my induction to the National Academy of Sciences 10 years later. All of the inductees were asked to send photos of themselves "in the field". Here I am at the induction:**
It was inspiring to see the great diversity of scientists---some kindly looking or petite woman or an ordinary or nerdy man on the stage dressed in "business attire" and on the screen above a photo of them somewhere with sleeves rolled up in a jungle or lab, doing their real work.
*Photo by Tanya Säily, University of Helsinki
**Photo by Marianne Brems