Annie Zaenen

Annie Else Zaenen (born 1941, in Belgium) is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University, California, United States.^[1]

Career

Zaenen obtained her Ph.D. at Harvard University with her doctoral thesis Extraction Rules in Icelandic in 1980.^[2] After a postdoc at MIT, she taught syntax at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Harvard, before joining PARC and Stanford.^[3] During the ‘90s, she was the manager of the Natural Language group of the Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France. After Zaenen retired from PARC in 2011, she joined a research group on Language and Natural Reasoning at CSLI working on the linguistic encoding of temporal and spatial information, local textual inferences and natural logic.^[4][3]

She has worked on both the syntax of Germanic languages and on the development of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), with excursions into lexical semantics.^[4][3] Her contributions to the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar are in the development of notions such as long-distance dependencies, functional uncertainty and the difference between subsumption and equality.^[4] She had numerous widely-cited publications on these topics.^[5][6] Zaenen is also known for her sharp commentary on research trends in Computational Linguistics.^[7]

Honors

In 2013, Zaenen was honored by a Festschrift, edited by Tracy Holloway King and Valeria de Paiva.^[8]

She was the founding editor of the online journal Linguistic Issues in Language Technology.^[9]

In 2024 Zaenen was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Department of Linguistics of the University of Konstanz.^[10]

Partial bibliography

• Tense and aspect ISBN 0-12-613514-2^[11]
• Modern Icelandic syntax ISBN 0-12-613524-X^[12]
• Papers in lexical-functional grammar^[13]
• Subjects and other subjects^[14]
• Extraction rules in Icelandic ISBN 0-8240-5443-1^[15]
• Architectures, rules, and preferences ISBN 1-57586-560-2^[16]