Richard S. Kayne

Richard S. Kayne is an American linguist born in 1944 who earned a BA in mathematics from Columbia University in 1964 and a PhD in linguistics from MIT in 1969, before holding positions at the University of Paris VIII from 1969 to 1986, MIT from 1986 to 1988, and the City University of New York from 1988 to 1997, and becoming Silver Professor at New York University in 1997. His research addresses the syntax of English and the Romance languages, especially French and Italian, within a transformational grammar framework, and his theory of antisymmetry, presented in the 1994 book The Antisymmetry of Syntax, became part of the core literature of minimalist syntax. He is a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and also published Movement and Silence in 2005.