Beth Levin

About

Beth Levin is the William H. Bonsall Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. She holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, earned in 1983, along with an S.M. degree in the same field from MIT in 1979 and an S.B. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT in 1976. Her professional experience includes serving as Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University during multiple terms (2003-2007, 2010-2011, 2025-2027) and as a faculty member since 1995. Levin has also held visiting faculty positions at various institutions, including the University of Colorado, Boulder; University of California, Berkeley; MIT; and Cornell University. She has been recognized with numerous honors, such as being named a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2019, a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2014, and a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2008. Her research focuses on linguistics, with a distinguished career dedicated to advancing understanding in her field through her academic leadership and scholarly contributions.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Mathematics
• History
• Business
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• Manner and result

  Studies in language companion series · 2014-01-09 · 61 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  As a deadjectival verb, English clean should be a clear-cut result verb, yet it often shows hallmarks of a manner verb. This paper investigates this dual behavior in light of manner/result complementarity: the proposal that verbs lexicalize either manner or result meaning components, but not both. We demonstrate that once lexicalized and contextually determined meaning components are distinguished, clean conforms to manner/result complementarity. It can be a result verb, not entailing a particul…

  PublisherDOI

• 39. Verb classes within and across languages

  2015-08-28 · 60 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Verb classes are sets of semantically-related verbs sharing a range of linguistic properties, such as: — possible realizations of their arguments — interpretation associated with each possible argument realization A big question posed by the Valency Project: Which facets of verb classification are universal and which language particular? Overview: — Review my general perspective on verb classes. — Introduce a development in my work on verb classes. — Consider its implications for future crosslin…

  PublisherDOI

• Argument Structure

  2013-05-28 · 60 citations

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  The term “argument structure” is used to refer to the lexical representation of argument-taking lexical items—typically verbs, but also nouns (especially nominalizations), adjectives, and even prepositions—that specifies sufficient information about these items’ arguments to allow their syntactic realization to be determined. An argument structure typically indicates the number of arguments a lexical item takes (e.g., the core participants in the eventuality a verb denotes), their syntactic expr…

  PublisherDOI

• Semantics and Pragmatics of Argument Alternations

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2014-10-08 · 59 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  After setting out the challenges posed by argument alternations for linguistic theory, this article reviews the development of accounts of argument alternations over the past 50 years, documenting a shift from accounts that are primarily syntactic in nature to accounts with semantic and pragmatic components. The remainder of this review consists of case studies of the developing understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of the dative alternation and the causative alternation. Each case study…

  PublisherDOI

• Talking about the weather: Two construals of precipitation events in English

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2019-06-13 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Weather expressions such as It is raining have proven challenging for linguistic researchers; not only do weather expressions often have special linguistic properties, but languages show considerable variation in the morphosyntactic expression of such events. The main claim pursued here is that, in English, precipitation happenings can be linguistically construed as events (in the sense of Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005) in two ways: as substance emission events—the sky is construed as emi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Malka Rappaport Hovav

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  35 shared

• Malka Rappaport

  Bar-Ilan University

  6 shared

• Beryl T. Atkins

  6 shared

• Dan Jurafsky

  4 shared

• Steven Pinker

  4 shared

• Judy Kegl

  3 shared

• Mary Laughren

  3 shared

• Grace Song

  2 shared

Education

• B.A., Linguistics

  Stanford University

• Ph.D., Linguistics

  Stanford University

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Christopher D. Manningh-149
• Meghan Sumnerh-10