LSA 2009

Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. received a B.A. in Linguistics from UC San Diego (1973) and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley (1977). He has taught at the University of Arizona, Temple University, UC Davis, and the University at Buffalo (SUNY). He is currently on leave from Buffalo and is Professor of General Linguistics at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. He has been a visiting researcher at the Australian National University and at the Max Planck Institutes for Psycholinguistics and for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. He has been awarded a NSF Graduate Fellowship, a Research Award for Outstanding Scholars from Outside of Germany from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2006) and a Max Planck Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (2008-12). Prof. Van Valin's research areas are syntactic theory, (neuro)cognitive aspects of language, including acquisition and sentence processing, and language typology. He has done work on Lakhota and Yateé Zapotec. These themes are woven together in his work in Role and Reference Grammar. He has published six books: Functional syntax and universal grammar (with W. Foley) (Cambridge UP, 1984), Advances in Role and Reference Grammar (ed.) (Benjamins, 1993), Syntax: structure, meaning and function (with R. LaPolla) (Cambridge UP, 1997), An introduction to syntax (Cambridge UP, 2001), Exploring the syntax-semantics interface (Cambridge UP, 2005), and Investigations of the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface (ed.) (Benjamins, in press). He is the general editor of the Oxford Surveys in Syntax and Morphology series (Oxford UP).