Alan Prince
American linguist / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the Canadian civil servant and scientist, see Alan Prince (civil servant).
Alan Sanford Prince (born 1946) is a Board of Governors Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Prince, along with Paul Smolensky, developed Optimality Theory, which was originally applied to phonology, but has been extended to other areas of linguistics such as syntax and semantics.