Laurence R. Horn

Who is Laurence R. Horn?

Laurence R. Horn is Professor of Linguistics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Linguistics at Yale University with specialties in pragmatics and semantics. He received his doctorate in 1972 from UCLA.

Horn's primary research program lies in the union of classical logic, lexical semantics, and neo-Gricean pragmatic theory. He mainly focused on the exploration of natural language negation and its relation to other operators. His work in pragmatics, in particular his innovation in the theory of scalar implicature, is widely influential. He is one of the group known as radical pragmaticists in the 1970s and was involved in the linguistics wars over generative semantics. The Horn scales are named after him. His 1989 book, A natural history of negation, is widely considered to be a masterpiece; in it, he lays out all the major topics concerning negation since Aristotle, and touches on negative polarity as well. Notable is his use of Aristotelian notions such as the Square of Oppositions, and syllogistic logic in a modern semantic/pragmatic setting.