Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA (born August 22, 1945) is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University.
[2] After graduating from Reed College in 1966 with a degree in philosophy,[1] Bresnan earned her doctorate in linguistics in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,[3] where she studied with Noam Chomsky.
[4] In the early and mid 1970s, her work focused on complementation and wh-movement constructions within transformational grammar, and she frequently took positions at odds with those espoused by Chomsky.
[7] A volume of papers written in the new framework and edited by Bresnan, entitled The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, appeared in 1982.
[1] Bresnan wrote an informal and somewhat humorous account of her career and works for her ACL Lifetime Achievement Award.