Adele Goldberg (linguist)


Adele Eva Goldberg is an American linguist, best known for the construction grammar in the tradition of cognitive linguistics.
Goldberg's research focus is on the psychology of language, including theoretical and experimental aspects of grammar and its representation, acquisition of form-function correspondences, and syntactic priming. Her works aim to illuminate parallels between language and other cognitive processes.
She is best known for her work on constructions: grammatical pairings of form and functions that are related to one another in a systematic network of learned knowledge; statistical preemption: the idea that competition between grammatical constructions in context can account for the ill-formedness of certain expressions that would otherwise be licensed; the creation and development of the novel construction-learning paradigm: which is akin to learning novel words with novel meanings; and the suggestion that both statistics and the functions of constructions play an important role in learning.
She argues that the functions of constructions often help demystify traditional linguistic puzzles such as island constraints, one-anaphora, and obligatory modifiers.
With Francesca Citron, she investigates the neural processing of conventional metaphors and their physical and emotional correlates.
Since 2004, she has been Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Princeton University. From 1997 to 2004, she was Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. From 1997 to 1998, she was Associate Professor of Linguistics and from 1992 to 1997 Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, San Diego.

Personal Life

In 1985, Goldberg received a B.A. in Mathematics and Philosophy from University of Pennsylvania. She received an M.A. in 1989 in linguistics, and in 1992 a PhD in linguistics, both from the University of California at Berkeley, studying with George Lakoff, Charles Fillmore, and Dan Slobin. She is married to Ali Yazdani, a professor of physics, and they have two children. Her brother is Ken Y. Goldberg, an IEOR professor at UC Berkeley, and Elena Man, a pediatrician with expertise in psychology and psychiatry, is her sister.

Awards