David Michael Pesetsky (born 1957) is an American

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

. He is the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and former Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the

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 ...

Education

He received a B.A. in linguistics from

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

in 1977 and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the

in 1982.

Career

Pesetsky taught at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in ...

and the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) is a public land-grant research university in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system and was founded in 1863 as the ...

before joining the faculty of MIT in 1988. Pesetsky was elected a

Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (FAAAS) is an honor accorded by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to distinguished persons who are members of the Association. Fellows are elected ...

in 2011, and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2013. He has published articles and books within the framework of

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

. A specialist in

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 ...

, he has published on the cross-linguistic properties of

wh-movement In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position ...

as well as the theory of argument structure. In a collaboration with Esther Torrego, he developed a theory of

grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and Numeral (linguistics), numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a Nominal group (functional grammar), n ...

noun phrases A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

, arguing that

nominative In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants of E ...

and

accusative In grammar, the accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to receive the direct object of a transitive verb. In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: "me", "him", "her", " ...

cases are the mirror image for the nominal system of phi feature agreement in the verbal system.Pesetsky, David and Esther Torrego (2001) "T-to-C: Causes and Consequences", in M. Kenstowicz (ed.) Ken Hale: A Life in Language. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 355-426. He has worked extensively on the structure of Russian, and recently has argued (in collaboration with Jonah Katz) that the syntax of tonal music is identical to the structure of language.Pesetsky, David and Jonah Katz (2011)
The Identity Thesis for Language and Music
In an article coauthored with Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues, Pesetsky criticized claims by Daniel Everett concerning the Pirahã language, touching off a protracted debate in the pages of the journal ''Language''.Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues (2009).
Piraha Exceptionality: a Reassessment
, ''Language'', 85.2, 355–404.Daniel Everett (2009),
Pirahã Culture and Grammar: a Response to some criticism
", ''Language'', 85.2, 405–442.Nevins, Andrew, David Pesetsky and Cilene Rodrigues (2009),
Evidence and Argumentation: a Reply to Everett (2009)
, ''Language'', 85.3, 671–681.

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External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Pesetsky, David Living people Linguists from the United States Generative linguistics Syntacticians MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences faculty University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty 1957 births Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America