After spending my youth on worthy but often hopeless
political causes and despairing about philosophy in Belgium, in my
earlier thirties I discovered Linguistics and
went to get my Ph.D at Harvard in 1980 on a dissertation on Extraction Rules in Icelandic. With
Joan Maling I focused the attention of the syntax community on
phenomena
such as Icelandic quirky case
proving that the subject of a sentence is not always
in the nominative case, notwithstanding pronouncements of some of the
Harvard faculty, and showed that Chomsky's ill-advised that-trace
filter was certainly not a universal, although there still seem
to be syntacticians that live under the illusion that it is. With many
others, I turned Perlmutter's pleasantly simple unaccusative hypothesis into the
mess that it now is. On the
constructive side, I have contributed to the theory of Lexical
Functional Grammar (LFG) in the development of notions such as long-distance dependencies, functional uncertainty and the
difference between subsumption
and equality. As a frustrated
early adopter of Lauri Karttunen's development tools for finite-state
morphology, I managed to create, with help from Carol Neidle, a
morphological analyzer for French that, after some revisions, became an
Inxight product. After
an adventurous stint as an area manager at the Xerox European Research
Center in Grenoble, France, in the 1990s I am now back in research at
PARC
and teaching Linguistics at Stanford. I am currently making plans for
an online journal about Linguistic Issues in Natural Language
Technology for CSLI Publications. I will be coteaching a course with
Joan Bresnan on Laboratory Syntax
at Stanford in the 2006 Spring Quarter.
Recent Publications
(with Lauri
Karttunen and Richard
Crouch) Local
Textual Inference: can
it be defined or circumscribed? ACL 2005 Workshop on Empirical
Modelling of Semantic Equivalence and Entailment. June 30, 2005. Ann
Arbor, Michigan.
(with Richard
Crouch and Lauri
Karttunen) Circumscribing
is
not
excluding: A reply to Manning. MS. Palo Alto Research Center. 2006.
(with Lauri
Karttunen) Veridicity.
In Annotating,
Extracting and Reasoning about Time and Events. Dagstuhl Seminar
Proceedings 05151, G. Katz, J. Pustejovsky, F. Schilder (eds.),
Dagstuhl, Germany. 2005.
(with Livia Polanyi)
Contextual Valence Shifters. In Computing Attitude
and Affect in Text, James G. Shanahan, Yan Qu, Janyce Wiebe
(eds.), Springer Verlag, Dordrecht, The Netherlands 2005.
Unaccusativity. In The Encyclopedia of
Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition, Keith Brown
(editor-in-chief). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United
Kingdom, 2005.
Book
Extraction
Rules in Icelandic. Garland Publishing, New York, NY,1985.
Books and Collections Edited
(with Philip Tedeschi) Tense and Aspect.
Syntax and Semantics, vol. 14. Academic Press, New York, NY, 1981.
(with Joan
Maling) Modern
Icelandic Syntax. Syntax and Semantics, vol. 24. Academic Press,
New York, NY, 1990.
(with M. Dalrymple, R. Kaplan and J. Maxwell) Formal Issues in
Lexical Functional Grammar. CSLI Lecture Notes. CSLI
Publications, Stanford, CA, 1995.
(with Ronald
Cole, Joseph
Mariani, Hans
Uszkoreit, Giovanni Battista
Varile, Antonio Zampolli) Survey of the State
of the Art in Human Language Technology. Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1997.
Some Classic Papers
(with Joan
Maling) The
Nonuniversality of a Surface Filter. Linguistic Inquiry 9(3), 475-497.
1978.
On Syntactic Binding.
Linguistic
Inquiry, 14(3), 469-504, 1983.
(with J.
Maling and H.
Thráinsson) Case and
Grammatical Functions: The Icelandic Passive. Natural Language
and Linguistic Theory, 3:4, 441-483, 1985.
(with R. Kaplan)
Long-distance Dependencies,
Constituent Structure, and
Functional Uncertainty. In Alternative Conceptions of Phrase
Structure,
M. Baltin and A. Kroch (eds.). Chicago University Press, Chicago, IL,
1989. (Reprinted in Formal Issues in
Lexical Functional Grammar.)
Annie Zaenen