User:Calalang/sandbox

This is a sample text for practicing editing etc. Hello. I think chocolate is a pretty cool discovery. Music is nice. Bees are also nice but I don't want them near me. Bees? Bees.

هل أنا جميل؟

Article Evaluation

I chose to evaluate the page on Pro-drop language. By and large, it seemed fine; however, I was immediately stricken by the sparseness of citations in the opening section. Particularly noticeable was that it listed seven languages and one family, but only provided citations for two of them. To be quite honest, I'm not sure if the article was accurate or not, but it seemed unbiased and neutral if nothing else. The talk page contains some lively discussions about Portuguese because of distinctions between Brazilian and European Portuguese. And, of course, I had to check on the Oregon section, which mentioned the construction "Do you want to come with?" which is a perfectly acceptable sentence to me as a native Oregonian. This example appears to fall under the article's explanation that English is not pro drop but can remove pronouns in specific contexts. The article is rated a C, which is a tad confusing to me but probably for reasons of incomplete explanations and sparse sources. I added my own comment to the Oregon question, affirming that it felt perfectly natural to my own intuition.

The following will be my modifications to the article on the linguist Joan Bresnan.

Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects (with Ronald Kaplan) of the theoretical framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.

After graduating from Reed College in 1966 with a degree in philosophy, Bresnan earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied with Noam Chomsky. In the early and mid 1970s, her work focused on complementation and wh-movement constructions within transformational grammar, and she frequently took positions at odds with those espoused by Chomsky.

Her dissatisfaction with transformational grammar led her to collaborate with Kaplan on a new theoretical framework, Lexical-Functional Grammar (or LFG). A volume of papers written in the new framework and edited by Bresnan, entitled The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, appeared in 1982. Since then, Bresnan's work has focused on LFG analyses of various phenomena, primarily in English, Bantu languages, and Australian languages. She has also worked on analyses in optimality theory, and has pursued statistical approaches to linguistics. She has a strong interest in linguistic typology, which has influenced the development of LFG. Additional research interests of hers include dynamics of probabilistic grammar and empirical foundations of syntax. In pursuit of the latter, she established Stanford's Spoken Syntax Lab.

Honors

Joan Bresnan served as the president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1999.

She was honored in August 2005 with a festschrift entitled Architectures, Rules, and Preferences: A Festschrift for Joan Bresnan, published by CSLI Publications in December 2007.

In 2016, she was selected as the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) Lifetime Achievement Award winner. She was elected as a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2015.

Teaching

In addition to Dr. Bresnan's current position at Stanford, she has also taught at University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a member of the faculty. Furthermore, she has taught as a visiting fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies.

Publications

As of December 16, 2018, Stanford lists forty-four books and papers that Bresnan has either authored or co-authored since 1996. However, she has been publishing since well over a decade before that. An incomplete selection of her particularly influential works appears below.

• 1982 Kaplan, Ronald and Joan Bresnan, "Lexical-Functional Grammar: A Formal System for Grammatical Representation," in J. Bresnan, ed., The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, Chapter 4, The MIT Press (1982) (pp.173-281).
• 1987 Bresnan, Joan and Sam A. Mchombo, "Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chichewa," Language LXIII.4 (December 1987) (pp. 741-782)
• 1996 Austin, Peter and Joan Bresnan, "Nonconfigurationality in Australian Aboriginal Languages," Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. 14 (pp. 215-268)
• 2001 Bresnan, Joan, Shipra, Dingare, and Christopher D. Manning. "Soft Constraints Mirror Hard Constraints: Voice and Person in English and Lummi," in proceedings of the LFG '01 Conference, University of Hong Kong. On-line, CSLI Publications: http://csli-publications.stanford.edu/LFG/6/lfg01.html.
• 2007 Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina, and R. Harald Baayen. "Predicting the Dative Alternation." In Cognitive Foundations of Interpretation, ed. by G. Bouma, I. Kraemer and J. Zwarts. Royal Netherlands Academy of Science, Amsterdam, pp. 69-94.
• 2007 "Is Syntactic Knowledge Probabilistic? Experiments with the English Dative Alternation." In Roots: Linguistics in search of its evidential base, Series: Studies in Generative Grammar, ed. by Sam Featherston and Wolfgang Sternefeld. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp.75-96.