Laurence R. Horn

Laurence Robert Horn is an American linguist born in 1945 who specializes in pragmatics and semantics and is professor emeritus in the linguistics department at Yale University, where he earlier served as chair and director of graduate studies. He earned his doctorate from UCLA in 1972, participated in the 1970s radical pragmaticist movement alongside scholars including Jerrold Sadock during the linguistics wars over generative semantics, and became known for innovations in scalar implicature theory; the Horn scales used to calculate Gricean generalized conversational implicatures are named after him. His 1989 book A Natural History of Negation, revised in 2001, comprehensively examines negation from Aristotle onward, and he served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2021.