Laurence R. Horn

Laurence R. Horn, professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy, received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1972. His dissertation, “On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English,” introduced the concept of scalar implicature. Since then, he has sought to extend the Gricean program for non-logical inference to a class of problems in logical and lexical semantics and the nature of negation.

Before joining the Yale faculty in 1981, he taught at UC Berkeley, USC, Wisconsin-Madison, and Aix-Marseille; at LSA Institutes at Stanford, UC Santa Cruz, Illinois, and Michigan State University, and at the LOT summer school at Utrecht.

He is the author of A Natural History of Negation (Chicago, 1989; reissued with new introduction by CSLI, 2001) and of over 100 papers and handbook entries on negation, polarity, implicature, presupposition, grammatical variation, word meaning, etymology, and lying. He edited The Expression of Negation (de Gruyter, 2010) and From Lying to Perjury: Linguistic and Legal Perspectives on Lies and Other Falsehoods (de Gruyter, 2022) and is a co-editor with Y. Kato of Negation and Polarity (Oxford, 1999), with G. Ward of The Handbook of Pragmatics (Blackwell-Wiley, 2004), with I. Kecskes of Explorations in Pragmatics (de Gruyter, 2007), with R. Zanuttini of Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English (OUP, 2010), and with K. Turner of Pragmatics, Truth and Underspecification (Brill, 2018). With Raffaella Zanuttini and Jim Wood, he is a charter member of the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project. He was editor of the Garland/Routledge series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics (1995- 2005).

A longtime member of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Dialect Society, he is an elected fellow of the LSA, served on the Executive Committee and as chair of the Program Committee, and was elected president of the society for 2021. He received the International Pragmatics Association’s John J. Gumperz lifetime achievement award in 2023. “Words in Edgewise,” an autoportrait of his career, can be found in the 2018 volume of the Annual Review of Linguistics here.