David Pesetsky

David Pesetsky is Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Linguistics, MacVicar Faculty Fellow and Head of the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. from Yale in 1977, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from MIT in 1982. Before joining the MIT faculty, he taught at USC and UMass Amherst, and has been an instructor at six previous LSA Institutes. Pesetsky's research focuses on syntax and its implications for other areas of linguistics. Many of his papers concern the structure of Russian, an language of special interest. Most recently, he has begun a collaborative investigation into the syntax of music and its relation to the syntax of language. His publications include the books Zero Syntax (1994), Phrasal Movement and its Kin (2000), Russian Case Morphology and the Syntactic Categories (2014), and numerous published papers. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2010, and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2013.