Alma mater MIT, Oxford | Name Janet Fodor Fields Psycholinguistics | |
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Books Semantics: Theories of Meaning in Generative Grammar Education Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1970), University of Oxford Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Doctoral advisor Noam Chomsky, James F. Thomson | ||
Institutions CUNY Graduate Center | ||
Janet Dean Fodor (born 1942) is Distinguished Professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition.
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Life
Born Janet Dean, she received her B.A. in 1964 and her M.A. in 1966, both from Oxford University. At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their 'equilibrium hypothesis' for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels. She received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT, looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality.
In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
She is married to Jerry Alan Fodor.