David Pesetsky
Education[edit]
He received a B.A. in linguistics from Yale in 1977 and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982.
Career[edit]
Pesetsky taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Massachusetts Amherst before joining the faculty of MIT in 1988. Pesetsky was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011,[1] and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2013.[2]
He has published articles and books within the framework of generative grammar. A specialist in syntax, he has published on the cross-linguistic properties of wh-movement as well as the theory of argument structure. In a collaboration with Esther Torrego, he developed a theory of grammatical case in noun phrases, arguing that nominative and accusative cases are the mirror image for the nominal system of phi feature agreement in the verbal system.[3] He has worked extensively on the structure of Russian, and recently has argued (in collaboration with Jonah Katz) that the syntax of tonal music is identical to the structure of language.[4]
In an article coauthored with Andrew Nevins and Cilene Rodrigues, Pesetsky criticized claims by Daniel Everett concerning the Pirahã language, touching off a protracted debate in the pages of the journal Language.[5][6][7]