Joan Bresnan, Date of Birth

Joan Bresnan

American linguist

Date of Birth: 22-Aug-1945

Profession: university teacher, linguist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Leo

Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University.
She is best known as one of the architects (with Ronald Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.After graduating from Reed College in 1966 with a degree in philosophy, Bresnan earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Noam Chomsky.
In the early and mid 1970s, her work focused on complementation and wh-movement constructions within transformational grammar, 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, and Australian languages.
She has also worked on analyses in optimality theory, and has pursued statistical approaches to linguistics.
She has a strong interest in linguistic typology, 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.