Annie Zaenen

Annie Zaenen is a Principal Scientist who works on natural language technology with a current focus on lexical semantics. She is also a consulting professor at Stanford and co-editor of the online eLanguage journal Linguistic Issues in Language Technology.

After spending her youth on worthy but often hopeless political causes in Belgium, Annie discovered linguistics in her earlier thirties and went to get a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1980.  With Joan Maling she focused the attention of the syntax community on phenomena such as Icelandic quirky case proving that the subject of a sentence is not always in the nominative case, notwithstanding pronouncements of some of the Harvard faculty, and showed that Chomsky's ill-advised that-trace filter was certainly not universal, although there still seem to be syntacticians that live under the illusion that it is. With many others, Annie turned Perlmutter's pleasantly simple unaccusative hypothesis into the mess that it now is.

On the more constructive side, Annie contributed to the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) in developing notions such as long-distance dependencies, functional uncertainty, and the difference between subsumption and equality. As a frustrated early adopter of Lauri Karttunen's development tools for finite-state morphology, she managed, with help from Carol Neidle, to create a morphological analyzer for French that, after some revisions, became an Inxight product. After an adventurous stint as an area manager at the Xerox European Research Center in Grenoble, France, in the 1990s, Annie came back to her current research position at PARC which she first joined over two decades ago.