Annie Else Zaenen (born 1941, in Belgium) is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University, California, United States.[1]
Zaenen obtained her Ph.D. at Harvard University with her doctoral thesis Extraction Rules in Icelandic in 1980.[2] After a postdoc at MIT, she taught syntax at the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, and Harvard, before joining PARC and Stanford.[3] During the ‘90s, she was the manager of the Natural Language group of the Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France. After Zaenen retired from PARC in 2011, she joined a research group on Language and Natural Reasoning at CSLI working on the linguistic encoding of temporal and spatial information, local textual inferences and natural logic.[4][3]
She has worked on both the syntax of Germanic languages and on the development of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), with excursions into lexical semantics.[4][3] Her contributions to the theory of Lexical Functional Grammar are in the development of notions such as long-distance dependencies, functional uncertainty and the difference between subsumption and equality.[4] She had numerous widely-cited publications on these topics.[5][6] Zaenen is also known for her sharp commentary on research trends in Computational Linguistics.[7]
In 2013, Zaenen was honored by a Festschrift, edited by Tracy Holloway King and Valeria de Paiva.[8]
She was the founding editor of the online journal Linguistic Issues in Language Technology.[9]