William O'Grady
William O'Grady (b. 1952) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and the clearest theorist of emergentist syntax working from outside the usage-based mainstream. His work takes seriously the project of explaining grammatical structure without innate UG, but does so through a different route from Tomasello or Nick Ellis: a linear, efficiency-driven processor whose primary job is reducing the load on working memory.
Syntactic Carpentry (2005, Erlbaum) is the book-length statement. It takes core syntactic phenomena — phrase structure, co-reference, control, agreement, contraction, extraction — and shows how each falls out of incremental processing constraints rather than principles of an innate language faculty. O'Grady has extended this programme to first-language acquisition, heritage-language development, and Koreanic languages, and his co-edited Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and introductory Contemporary Linguistics textbook have given the emergentist position a visible teaching platform.
Career
- Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
- Affiliated with the Center for Korean Studies, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
- Adjunct Professor, Island Studies Program, University of Prince Edward Island
Published Work
- Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax (2005, Erlbaum)
- How Children Learn Language (2005, Cambridge)
- "An Emergentist Approach to Syntax" (2010)
- Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (co-authored textbook)
Influence
- Developed a processor-centred emergentist alternative to both UG and usage-based accounts
- Shaped contemporary heritage-language acquisition research
- Published accessible books that make emergentism a live option in undergraduate and graduate teaching