Jan Koster is a Dutch linguist, and currently a full professor at the University of Groningen

University of Groningen

The University of Groningen , located in the city of Groningen, was founded in 1614. It is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands as well as one of its largest. Since its inception more than 100,000 students have graduated...

 in The Netherlands.

He studied at the University of Amsterdam, where, after visiting MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1976), he received his PhD in 1978. Before moving to Groningen (in 1986), Koster was assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and Utrecht University

Utrecht University

Utrecht University is a university in Utrecht, Netherlands. It is one of the oldest universities in the Netherlands and one of the largest in Europe. Established March 26, 1636, it had an enrollment of 29,082 students in 2008, and employed 8,614 faculty and staff, 570 of which are full professors....

, and associate professor at Tilburg University.

With Henk van Riemsdijk and Jean-Roger Vergnaud, Koster was one of the founders of GLOW

Generative Linguistics in the Old World

Generative Linguistics in the Old World is an international organization, founded in 1977 and based in the Netherlands...

, the major European organization of generative linguistics

Generative linguistics

Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping,...

. He was co-founder and editor of The Linguistic Review and is currently co-editor (with van Riemsdijk and Harry van der Hulst) of Studies in Generative Grammar (published by Mouton de Gruyter). He specializes in theoretical syntax and the philosophy and history of linguistics. He made notable contributions to the theories of word order

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest...

, locality and anaphora

Anaphora (linguistics)

In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic--for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent...

.

Selected publications

• Locality Principles in Syntax (1978). Dordrecht: Foris.
• Domains and Dynasties (1987). Dordrecht: Foris.
• (With E. Reuland, Eds.) Long-Distance Anaphora (1991). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.