David Lightfoot (linguist)
David Lightfoot | |
|---|---|
| Born | David William Lightfoot February 10, 1945 |
| Nationality | United States |
| Occupation(s) | 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 who served both as assistant director, of the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences from 2005 to 2009, and as the President of the Linguistic Society of America from 2010 to 2011. As of 2024, he is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. He is the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. Lightfoot is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). He is also a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Lightfoot has been a Guest Professor of linguistics at the Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) since 2016.
His research focuses on language acquisition, change, and evolution.
Lightfoot has published widely in generative syntax and is best known for his theoretical stance that an accurate description of the basic principles of generative grammar requires an understanding of how they could be acquired, thus linking them to human biology and development. In the 1970s, he was one of the linguists who helped renew interest in diachronic syntax, the study of syntactic change over time, and the emergence of new syntactic phenomena.
More recently, Lightfoot argued that children are born to assign structures to their ambient language, yielding a view of language variation not based on parameters defined at Universal Grammar. This 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.