Jane Grimshaw

Jane Barbara Grimshaw is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is known for her contributions to the areas of syntax, optimality theory, language acquisition, and lexical representation.

Education

Grimshaw received her B.A. in anthropology and linguistics from University College London in 1973, and her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1977.

Grimshaw was on the faculty of Linguistics at Brandeis University from 1977 to 1992. There she worked closely with Ray Jackendoff, with whom she was a co-principal investigator on several projects.
In 1992, she joined the faculty of Linguistics at Rutgers. She is a member of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, and was the acting co-director from 2011 to 2012.
She taught at two Linguistic Society of America Linguistic Summer Institutes: University of California, Santa Cruz and University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
She of the Linguistic Society of America from 1996 to 1998.

Grimshaw is married to linguist Alan Prince.

Selected Papers in Optimality Theory:
* Projection, heads, and optimality
* The best clitic: Constraint conflict in morphosyntax
* Optimal clitic positions and the lexicon in romance clitic systems
* Economy of structure in OT
* Chains as unfaithful optima
* Location specific constraints in matrix and subordinate clauses
* Last resorts and grammaticality, in Optimality Theory and Minimalism: A Possible Convergence, Broekhuis, Hans, and Vogel, Ralf, eds.
* Last resorts: A typology of do-support
* Linguistic and cognitive explanation in Optimality Theory, with Bruce Tesar and Alan Prince. in