Jan Koster (born 8 July 1945 in

Delft Delft () is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the Provinces of the Netherlands, province of South Holland, Netherlands. It is located between Rotterdam, to the southeast, ...

) is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at the

University of Groningen The University of Groningen (abbreviated as UG; , abbreviated as RUG) is a Public university#Continental Europe, public research university of more than 30,000 students in the city of Groningen (city), Groningen, Netherlands. Founded in 1614, th ...

. Koster studied at the

University of Amsterdam The University of Amsterdam (abbreviated as UvA, ) is a public university, public research university located in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Established in 1632 by municipal authorities, it is the fourth-oldest academic institution in the Netherlan ...

, where, after being a visiting scientist at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976), he received his PhD in 1978. Before being appointed full professor and chair of the linguistics department at

Groningen Groningen ( , ; ; or ) is the capital city and main municipality of Groningen (province), Groningen province in the Netherlands. Dubbed the "capital of the north", Groningen is the largest place as well as the economic and cultural centre of ...

(in 1985), Koster was assistant professor at the

and

Utrecht University Utrecht University (UU; , formerly ''Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht'') is a public university, public research university in Utrecht, Netherlands. Established , it is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands. In 2023, it had an enrollment of ...

, and associate professor at

Tilburg University Tilburg University is a Catholic research university specializing in the social and behavioral sciences, economics, law, business sciences, theology and humanities, located in Tilburg, Netherlands. Tilburg has a student population of about 19,1 ...

. With

Henk van Riemsdijk Henk van Riemsdijk (born 27 April 1948 in The Hague, The Netherlands) is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University. Career Van Riemsdijk studied linguistics at the Paris 8 University Vincennes-Saint-Denis and at the Univers ...

and Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Koster was one of the founders of GLOW, the major European organization of

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

.Frederick J. Newmeyer, ''Linguistic Theory in America: The First Quarter-Century of Transformational Generative Grammar.'' New York

tc. TC, T.C., Tc, Tc, tc, tC, or .tc may refer to: Arts and entertainment Film and television * Theodore "T.C." Calvin, a character on the TV series '' Magnum, P.I.'' and its reboot * Tom Caron, American television host for New England Sports Netw ...

Academic Press, 1980. He was co-founder and editor of ''The Linguistic Review'' and was until his retirement co-editor (with van Riemsdijk and

Harry van der Hulst Harry van der Hulst (born 1953, The Hague) is full professor of linguistics and director of undergraduate studies at the department of linguistics of the University of Connecticut. He has been editor-in-chief of the international SSCI peer-revie ...

) of ''Studies in Generative Grammar'' (published by Mouton de Gruyter). He specializes in theoretical syntax and the philosophy and history of linguistics. He made notable contributions to the theories of

word order In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlatio ...

, locality and anaphora.

Selected publications

*''Locality Principles in Syntax'' (1978). Dordrecht: Foris. *''Domains and Dynasties'' (1987). Dordrecht: Foris. *(With E. Reuland, Eds.) ''Long-Distance Anaphora'' (1991). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

References

External links

Home page Jan Koster (University of Groningen)
1945 births Living people Linguists from the Netherlands Syntacticians People from Delft University of Amsterdam alumni Academic staff of Tilburg University Academic staff of the University of Amsterdam Academic staff of the University of Groningen Academic staff of Utrecht University {{Netherlands-linguist-stub