David Lightfoot (linguist)
David Lightfoot | |
|---|---|
| Born | David William Lightfoot February 10, 1945 |
| Occupations | Linguist, academic, educator, author |
| Years active | 1971—present |
| Awards | The Linguistic Society of America's Linguistic Service Award (2013), The Linguistic Society of America's Distinguished Teaching Award (2013) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Michigan |
| Thesis | Natural Logic and the Moods of Classical Greek (1971) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robin Lakoff |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguistics |
| Sub-discipline | Syntactic theory, language acquisition, language change |
| Institutions | |
| Notable works | Principles of Diachronic Syntax (CUP 1979), The Language Lottery: Toward a Biology of Grammars (MIT Press, 1982), How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change (MIT Press, 1991), and The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change, and Evolution (Blackwell, 1999). |
David William Lightfoot (born February 10, 1945) is an American linguist and academic. He is an Emeritus Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Lightfoot served as assistant director of the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences from 2005 to 2009 and as President of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) from 2010 to 2011. He founded the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. Lightfoot has been a Guest Professor of linguistics at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) since 2016.
Lightfoot is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Lightfoot works on generative syntax, language acquisition, and historical language change. He is known for arguing that describing the principles of grammar requires understanding how language is acquired, linking grammatical theory to human biology. He argued that children are born to assign structures to their ambient language. This yields a view of language variation not based on parameters defined at Universal Grammar. His approach extends Minimalist thinking (by dispensing with parameters) evaluation metrics for the selection of grammars, and any independent parsing mechanism. Instead, both external and internal languages play crucial, interacting roles, allowing an “open” Universal Grammar.