David Lightfoot (linguist)

David Lightfoot
Born	(1945-02-10) February 10, 1945
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Michigan
Academic work
Discipline	Linguist
Sub-discipline	Syntactic theory, language acquisition, language change
Institutions	McGill University University of Utrecht University of Maryland Georgetown University

David William Lightfoot (born February 10, 1945) is an American linguist who served as an assistant director of the National Science Foundation from 2005 to 2009. He is Emeritus Professor of linguistics at Georgetown University.

Books written

• Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (1979).
• The language lottery: Toward a biology of grammars. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA (1982). [Spanish translation: Ediciones Antonio Machado, Madrid; Chinese translation: Liaoning Educational Publishing House] [Section on 'Creativity and Political Enlightenment' reprinted in C. Otero, ed. 1994 Noam Chomsky: Critical assessments. Routledge: London].
• How to set parameters: Arguments from language change. MIT Press [Bradford Books]: Cambridge, MA (1991).
• The development of language: Acquisition, change, and evolution. Blackwell: Oxford (1999).
• The language organ: Linguistics as cognitive physiology. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (2002) (with Stephen Anderson).
• How new languages emerge. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (2006).
• Born to parse: How children select their languages. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA (2020)

Books edited

• Explanation in linguistics: The logical problem of language acquisition. Longman: London (1981) [with an introduction] [Japanese translation: Shinyo-sha] (with N. Hornstein).
• Verb movement. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge (1994) [with an introduction] (with N. Hornstein).
• Syntactic effects of morphological change. Oxford University Press: Oxford (2002) [with an introduction].
• Variable properties: Their nature and acquisition. Georgetown University Press (2019) [with J. Havenhill]