Carl Pollard, Linguistics

Carl Pollard is professor emeritus of linguistics at Ohio State. He is the co-inventor of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), a generative grammar theory. It is called ‘head-driven’ to reflect the importance of information, which is encoded in the lexical heads of syntactic phrases. HPSG has become one of the most important theories of natural language syntax and has been applied and tested in over 40 languages.

Pollard is a national and international leader in linguistics and has published widely on topics in syntactic theory, semantics, mathematical linguistics, and the syntactic analysis of English and of Chinese. Pollard received the University Distinguished Scholar Award in 2005.