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Samuel Jay Keyser

Samuel Jay Keyser is Professor Emeritus in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and Special Assistant to the Chancellor. Head of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy from 1977 to 1998, he also held the positions of Director of the Center for Cognitive Science and Associate Provost.

Titles by This Author

Mens et Mania

The MIT Nobody Knows
By Samuel Jay Keyser

When Jay Keyser arrived at MIT in 1977 to head the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, he writes, he "felt like a fish that had been introduced to water for the first time." At MIT, a colleague grabbed him by the lapels to discuss dark matter; Noam Chomsky called him "boss" (double SOB spelled backward?); and engaging in conflict resolution made him feel like "a marriage counselor trying to reconcile a union between a Jehovah’s witness and a vampire." In Mens et Mania, Keyser recounts his academic and administrative adventures during a career of more than thirty

Prolegomenon to a Theory of Argument Structure

By Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser

This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that the behavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simple principles. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration defined over just two relations, complement and specifier, where these configurations are constrained to preclude iteration and to permit only binary branching.

The Structure of the Japanese Language

By Samuel Jay Keyser and Susumu Kuno

Titles by This Editor

Step by Step

Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik
Edited by Roger Martin, David Michaels, Juan Uriagereka and Samuel Jay Keyser

This collection of essays presents an up-to-date overview of research in the minimalist program of linguistic theory. The book includes a new essay by Noam Chomsky as well as original contributions from other renowned linguists.Contributors : Andrew Barss, Zeljko Boskovic, Noam Chomsky, Hamida Demirdache, Hiroto Hoshi, Kyle Johnson, Roger Martin, Keiko Murasugi, Javier Ormazabal, Mamoru Saito, Daiko Takahashi, Juan Uriagereka, Myriam Uribe-Extebarria, Ewa Willim.

The View from Building 20

Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger
Edited by Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser

These seven original essays commissioned in tribute to MIT Philosophy Professor Sylvain Bromberger present some of the most exciting research being conducted today in linguistics. Each essay is informed by Bromberger's ongoing inquiry into how we "come to know that there are things in the world that we don't know." Included in the collection is the edited version of Noam Chomsky's minimalist paper.

Recent Transformational Studies in European Languages

Edited by Samuel Jay Keyser

This is the third publication in the Linguistic Inquiry Monograph Series, which presents new and original research beyond the scope of the article format.