Alan Prince

Alan Sanford Prince (born 1946) is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics.

Biography Prince went to high school in Fairfax, Virginia, got his BA with "great distinction" from McGill University, and received his PhD from MIT in 1975. Before coming to Rutgers, he was a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2010 Prince was named the Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Linguistics. He became an Emeritus Professor at Rutgers in 2015 upon his retirement. The "Short 'schrift for Alan Prince" was assembled for this occasion, and presented to him at the 2015 Rutgers Typology Workshop.

Prince is married to Jane Grimshaw, who is a Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at Rutgers University.

Awards In 1998, Prince was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Key Publications