Pieter Seuren

My career started in 1967, when I became a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. In 1970 I moved to Oxford, where I again became a lecturer in Linguistics. In 1974 I took up the chair of Philosophy of Language at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. In 1995 I moved over to the Arts Faculty of that university, to become the professor of Theoretical Linguistics. Since 1999 I have been a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, also at Nijmegen. My publication list comprises about 180 titles, mostly articles, but including seven major books: Operators and Nucleus (Cambridge University Press 1969), Discourse Semantics (Blackwell 1985), Semantic Syntax (Blackwell 1996), Western Linguistics (Blackwell 1998), Chomsky’s Minimalism, (Oxford University Press [OUP] 2004,) Language in Cognition (OUP 2009), The Logic of Language (OUP 2010). My main interests are the theory of grammar and meaning, presupposition theory and the history of linguistics. From about 1980 till 1995 I occupied myself intensively with Creole languages, doing field research in and describing the grammars of the Surinamese Creole Sranan, for which I developed a (now official) orthography, and of Mauritian Creole. My theoretical orientation is based on Generative Semantics, which I helped develop during the 1960s and which I expanded into a fully fledged theory of language, steering a middle course between formalism and ecologism. In 1988 I was elected as a fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences.