Beth Levin
Department of Linguistics
Stanford University
Beth Levin is the William H. Bonsall Professor in the Humanities at
Stanford. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1983 and then spent four
years at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science, where she had major
responsibility for the Lexicon Project. From 1987 to 1999 she was a
professor in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University.
She joined the Stanford Department of Linguistics in September 1999 and
was department chair in 2003-2007 and 2010-2011. In 1999-2000 she was a
fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and
in 2008 she was named a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial
Foundation. She is also a fellow of the Cognitive Science Socieety and
the Linguistic Society of America.
Her research focuses on the lexicon---the component of the language
system that serves as a repository for information on the words of a
language. She has conducted extensive breadth- and depth-first
studies of the English verb lexicon, which have provided the
foundation for much of her theoretical research. Her recent work
investigates the linguistic representation of events and the ways in
which events and their participants are expressed in English and other
languages. This research requires developing models of verb meaning,
as verbs are the main words used to describe events. Her publications
include Argument Realization (2005, coauthored with Malka
Rappaport Hovav), Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics
Interface (1995, coauthored with Malka Rappaport Hovav),
English Verb Classes and Alternations: A Preliminary
Investigation (1993), and Lexical and Conceptual Semantics
(1992, coedited with Steven Pinker), as well as numerous papers.
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