Alec Marantz (born January 31, 1959) is an American linguist and researcher in the fields of

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

, morphology, and

neurolinguistics Neurolinguistics is the study of Nervous system, neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fie ...

. Until 2007, he was Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, and Research Director of KIT/MIT MEG Joint Research Lab. He has been working at

New York University New York University (NYU) is a private university, private research university in New York City, New York, United States. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded in 1832 by Albert Gallatin as a Nondenominational ...

since 2007, and became Silver Professor of Linguistics and Psychology in 2019. Since the 1980s Marantz has made significant contributions to syntactic theory, especially regarding the structural representation of syntactic arguments, and the semantic and morphological implications of this representation. In the early 1990s Marantz proposed (together with Morris Halle) a theory of architecture of grammar known as Distributed Morphology. More recently, he has been using

magnetoencephalography Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is a functional neuroimaging technique for mapping brain activity by recording magnetic fields produced by electric current, electrical currents occurring naturally in the human brain, brain, using very sensitive magn ...

(MEG) to study human language processing, particularly morphology and the mental lexicon.

References

Marantz's approach to linguistic theory is characterized by its emphasis on the empirical base of linguistics, including (but not necessarily limited to) evidence from native-speaker intuitions, child language, language processing, and the neural organization of language.

External links

MorphLab page

Distributed Morphology

KIT/MIT MEG Joint Research Lab

Linguists from the United States Living people MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Oberlin College alumni Morphologists 1959 births {{US-linguist-stub Silver professors