Alan Prince Explained

Alan Sanford Prince (born 1946) is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics.

Biography

Prince went to high school in Fairfax, Virginia, got his BA with "great distinction" from McGill University, and received his PhD from MIT in 1975. Before coming to Rutgers, he was a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2010 Prince was named the Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Linguistics.^[1] He became an Emeritus Professor at Rutgers in 2015 upon his retirement. The "Short 'schrift for Alan Prince" was assembled for this occasion, and presented to him at the 2015 Rutgers Typology Workshop.^[2]

Prince is married to Jane Grimshaw,^[3] who is a Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Rutgers University.^[4]

Awards

In 1998, Prince was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.^[5]

Key Publications

• Liberman . Mark . Prince . Alan . 1977 . On stress and linguistic rhythm . Linguistic Inquiry . 8 . 249–336 . 2 . 4177987.
• Book: McCarthy . John J. . Yearbook of Morphology 1993 . Prince . Alan . Springer . 1993 . 978-94-017-3712-8 . Booij . G. . 79–153 . Generalized alignment . 10.1007/978-94-017-3712-8_4 . Van Marle . J..
• McCarthy . John J. . Faithfulness and reduplicative identity . Prince . Alan . Papers in Optimality Theory . 1995 . University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics . 18. 249–384 .
• Pinker . Steven . Steven Pinker . Prince . Alan . March 1988 . On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition . Cognition . 28 . 1–2 . 73–193 . 10.1016/0010-0277(88)90032-7. 2450717 . 12217058 .
• Prince . Alan S. . 1983 . Relating to the grid . Linguistic Inquiry . 14 . 19–100 . 4178311 . 1.
• Book: Prince . Alan . Optimality Theory: Constraint interaction in generative grammar . Smolensky . Paul . Wiley . 2008 . 978-0-470-75939-4 . 1993.

External links

• Homepage at Rutgers

Notes and References

1. http://news.rutgers.edu/medrel/news-releases/2010/12/alan-prince-named-ru-20101214 Alan Prince Named Rutgers Board of Governors Professor
2. Web site: Past Conferences and Workshops .
3. Web site: Grimshaw. Jane. Retirement = time. Short ’schrift for Alan Prince. 28 May 2015 . 10 January 2016.
4. Web site: Faculty .
5. http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/alan-prince/ John Simon Guggenheim Foundation