Career
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. He went to high school in Fairfax, Virginia, got his Bachelor with "great distinction" from McGill University, and received his Doctor of Philosophy from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before coming to Rutgers, Prince was a professor of linguistics at Brandeis University and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2010 Prince was named the Rutgers Board of Governors Professor of Linguistics.
