Joan Bybee

Joan Lea Bybee is an American linguist born February 11, 1945, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and a professor emerita at the University of New Mexico specializing in phonology, morphology, cognitive linguistics and historical linguistics. She developed usage-based phonology and advanced understanding of grammaticalization, the process by which words come to express abstract grammatical meaning through repeated use, and her 1985 book Morphology: A Study of the Relation between Meaning and Form examined semantic patterns across fifty typologically diverse languages. In the late 1980s and early 1990s she proposed the Network Model to explain how speakers cognitively represent morphologically complex words, and she served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004.