James Rogers

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

James Rogers studies the theoretical foundations of the grammar formalisms that are used by linguists and computational linguists to describe the structure of human languages. He is a member of the faculty of Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, where he is the convener of the Department of Computer Science.

During his year at Radcliffe, he will be working with Geoffrey K. Pullum and Barbara C. Scholz compiling a book-length exposition of model-theoretic syntax (MTS), an approach to specifying the structure of language using techniques from the realm of formal logic, in particular from the areas of model theory and descriptive complexity. This approach allows languages to be described purely in terms of their abstract properties while preserving the ability to translate effectively the descriptions into algorithms for processing the languages they describe.

Rogers earned his PhD in computer science at the University of Delaware, has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, University of Pennsylvania, and has taught at the University of Central Florida as well as at Earlham. His doctoral research was among the earliest work in the area of MTS, and he has lectured and taught widely in the area. He is the author of A Descriptive Approach to Language-Theoretic Complexity (FoLLI/CSLI Publications, 1998), an early monograph on MTS. He is a past president of the Association for Mathematics of Language.