David Lightfoot

David Lightfoot is an American linguist born February 10, 1945, in Looe, Cornwall, in the United Kingdom, and professor emeritus at Georgetown University, where he founded the linguistics department at the University of Maryland earlier in his career and later served as dean of the Georgetown graduate school and assistant director of the National Science Foundation directorate for social, behavioral, and economic sciences from 2005 to 2009. His research addresses generative syntax, language acquisition, and historical language change, and his 1979 book Principles of Diachronic Syntax introduced the concept of radical reanalysis, in which new generations of speakers reinterpret linguistic structures based on the input they receive; later books include The Language Lottery in 1982, How New Languages Emerge in 2006, and Born to Parse in 2020. He served as president of the Linguistic Society of America from 2010 to 2011 and received its Linguistic Service Award and Distinguished Teaching Award in 2013.