David Pesetsky

Who is David Pesetsky?

David Michael Pesetsky is an American linguist. He is the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics and Head of the Linguistics Section of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He received a B.A. in linguistics from Yale in 1977 and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1982. Pesetsky has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Massachusetts Amherst before joining the faculty of MIT in 1988. Pesetsky was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011, and a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2012.

He has published numerous articles and books within the framework of generative grammar. A specialist in syntax, he has published on the cross-linguistic properties of wh-movement as well as the theory of argument structure. In a collaboration with Esther Torrego, he developed a theory of grammatical case in noun phrases, arguing that nominative and accusative cases are the mirror image for the nominal system of phi feature agreement in the verbal system.