Janet Dean Fodor

Janet Dean Fodor was an American linguist born April 12, 1942, who grew up in England and died August 28, 2023. She was a distinguished professor emerita of psycholinguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, having earned her PhD at MIT under Noam Chomsky after a BA and MA from Somerville College, Oxford. Her research addressed human sentence processing, prosody, and learnability theory, including a two-stage model of parsing developed with Lyn Frazier and work on how prosody shapes comprehension and on the mental representation of empty categories in sentence structure. She was elected president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997, held a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, and was a corresponding fellow of the British Academy from 2014.