Janet Dean Fodor (April 12, 1942 – August 28, 2023)[2] was distinguished professor emerita of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

[3] Her primary field was psycholinguistics,[4] and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition.

[6] At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their 'equilibrium hypothesis' for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels.

[7] She received her Ph.D. in 1970 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[8] looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality.

[19] Building off of the work of her doctoral advisor, Noam Chomsky, Fodor wrote an article on the importance of identifying empty categories in sentence processing.

Empty categories can “account for certain regularities of sentence structure”, and attaching it with a previous word or phrase can help determine what it means.