Alan Sanford Prince is a professor of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 at Rutgers University

Rutgers University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...

. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky

Paul Smolensky

Paul Smolensky is a professor of Cognitive Science at the Johns Hopkins University.Along with Alan Prince he developed Optimality Theory, a representational model of linguistics...

, developed Optimality Theory

Optimality theory

Optimality theory is a linguistic model proposing that the observed forms of language arise from the interaction between conflicting constraints. OT models grammars as systems that provide mappings from inputs to outputs; typically, the inputs are conceived of as underlying representations, and...

, which was originally applied to phonology

Phonology

Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...

, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 such as syntax

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

 and semantics

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

. He went to high school in Fairfax, Virginia

Fairfax, Virginia

The City of Fairfax is an independent city forming an enclave within the confines of Fairfax County, in the Commonwealth of Virginia in the United States. Although politically independent of the surrounding county, the City is nevertheless the county seat....

, got his BA with "great distinction" from McGill University

McGill University

Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

, and received his Ph.D. from MIT

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

. Before coming to Rutgers, Prince was a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University

Brandeis University

Brandeis University is an American private research university with a liberal arts focus. It is located in the southwestern corner of Waltham, Massachusetts, nine miles west of Boston. The University has an enrollment of approximately 3,200 undergraduate and 2,100 graduate students. In 2011, it...

 and at the University of Massachusetts

University of Massachusetts

This article relates to the statewide university system. For the flagship campus often referred to as "UMass", see University of Massachusetts Amherst...

.

In 2010 Prince was named the Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Linguistics.

External links

• Homepage at Rutgers