Optimality Theoretic Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics

Geraldine Legendre is Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. She co-developed, with Paul Smolensky, the soft constraint-based precursor to Optimality Theory and has played a major role in the development of OT in syntax since the early 1990s, focussing particularly on comparative studies of phenomena in syntax and at the syntax-semantics interface and on the modelling of early child syntax and code-switching. She is co-author of The Harmonic Mind (with Paul Smolensky; MIT Press, 2006) and co-editor of Optimality-Theoretic Syntax (with Jane Grimshaw and Sten Vikner; MIT Press, 2001).


Michael T. Putnam is Associate Professor of German and Linguistics at Penn State University. His work focuses on gaining a better understanding of the cognitive architecture underlying the language faculty at the intersection of culture, grammar, and performance biases, and he has published widely on comparative Germanic linguistics, the morphosyntax-semantics interface, and bilingualism. He is the author of The Structural Design of Language (with Thomas S. Stroik; CUP, 2013) and editor of Studies in German-Language Islands (Benjamins, 2011).


Henriette de Swart is Professor of French Linguistics and Semantics at Utrecht University. Her research is concerned with cross-linguistic variation at the syntax-semantics-pragmatic interface, looking specifically at tense and aspect, negation, indefinites, genericity, and bare nominals. Her publications include Introduction to Natural Language Semantics (University of Chicago Press, 1998), The Semantics of Incorporation (with Donka Farkas; CSLI, 2003), and Conflicts in Interpretation (with Petra Hendriks, Helen de Hoop, and Irene Kraemer; Equinox, 2010).


Erin Zaroukian is a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Research and Engineering Directorate of the US Army Research Laboratory, where her primary research is in human-computer collaboration. Her PhD work focused on formal semantics of approximation and hedging, which she continued, with an experimental focus, as a postdoctoral researcher in the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (Ecole Normale Superieure, PSL Research University, CNRS).