Paul Smolensky, a professor in the
Cognitive Science
Department of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences,
has been named a Krieger-Eisenhower Professor.
Smolensky is internationally renowned for his work in
formal theoretical approaches to linguistics, in
particular, for having developed, with Alan Prince of
Rutgers, a novel formal characterization of the complex
rule systems of grammar called Optimality Theory.
Smolensky has been a member of the Cognitive Science
Department since 1994 and served as chair between 1997 and
2000. Since 1994, he has been assistant director of the
Center for Language
and Speech Processing. He also is the architect and
director of the NSF Interdisciplinary Graduate Education
Research and Training Program in Cognitive Science, which
was designed to create a new breed of scientist trained in
multidisciplinary approaches to the study of language and
mind.
Smolensky's work begins with the recognition that
higher cognitive domains like language and reasoning rely
on complex symbolic rule systems, but it equally
acknowledges that the higher forms of intelligence encoded
in symbolic systems reside in the brain, where computation
appears to be numerical, not symbolic. He has developed a
mathematical theory of the mind/brain that allows for the
formal combination of symbolic, numerical (neural) and
statistical computation, explaining how the complex
symbolic systems that characterize language and thought
could be instantiated in the brain and affected by the
statistical regularities inherent in experience.
According to a part of this general theory, Optimality
Theory, human languages share a common set of universal
constraints that govern the well-formedness of words and
sentences. But since these constraints are highly general,
they conflict and thus at any moment some of the underlying
constraints must be violated in optimal, that is,
grammatical, structures. The different patterns that
characterize the world's languages emerge via the
differential ways languages prioritize the fixed set of
universal constraints.
Optimality Theory provides a new computational
architecture for human language; it is widely recognized as
the most important modification to Noam Chomsky's theories
of language and generative grammar to appear over the
course of the last three decades.
Smolensky's innovative formal contributions to
cognitive science and linguistics have been recognized by
the award of numerous prizes, most recently that of the
David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to
Cognitive Science, in 2005. He is author or editor of well
over 100 articles and of seven books, the most recent of
which is the landmark two-volume work The Harmonic
Mind (with JHU's Géraldine Legendre). His
ongoing research is dedicated to exploring multiple aspects
of Optimality Theory in phonology as well as the wider
implications of his theory for psycholinguistics,
neuroscience and the philosophy of mind.