Farrell Ackerman

University of California, San Diego

Farrell Ackerman is Professor of Linguistics and Director of the Human Development Program at UC San Diego. His primary interests are in the interaction between substantive language description, primarily of Uralic and Kordofanian languages, and their relevance for theory construction, especially from the perspective of lexicalist and construction-theoretic frameworks. These interests are reflected in his books A Theory of Predicates (with Gert Webelhuth) CSLI 1998, Proto-Properties and Grammatical Encoding (with John Moore) CSLI 2001, and Language Description and Linguistic Theory: A Construction-Theoretic Study in Morphosyntax (with Irina Nikolaeva), to appear in 2011 (CSLI). His recent focus is the development of word-based morphological theories, utilizing information-theoretic measures and simulations to explore paradigmatic and syntagmatic organization. This is typified in Malouf and Ackerman 2010, "Paradigms: The Low Entropy Conjecture" (paper presented at the Workshop on Morphology and Formal Grammar, Paris) and Malouf and Ackerman 2010, "An Evolutionary Explanation for the Paradigm Economy Principle" (paper presented at 2010 Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Baltimore).