Prof. Ed Keenan and Dr. Carol Archie have made a generous gift to the department to support fellowships for graduate students who use mathematics to understand language, or who study theoretical computational linguistics. The department is deeply grateful to Ed and Carol.
Ed has been at UCLA since 1974; he retired as Distinguished Professor in 2012. He is renowned as a foundational contributor to the fields of mathematical linguistics and formal semantics, and for his work on syntactic typology (including the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy). He is also noted for his fieldwork on Malagasy, and his research on the historical development of English syntax. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he was the 2015 recipient of the S.-Y. Kuroda Prize from the Association for Mathematics of Language. He has been the chair or co-chair of 15 Ph.D. committees and a member of 55 others (in departments across campus). The author of over 140 publications, he has published two books since his retirement, most recently Eliminating the Universe: Logical Properties of Natural Language (2018).