Henriette de Swart


Henriëtte Elisabeth de Swart is a Dutch linguist. She earned her PhD at Groningen University in 1991. She was a research fellow at Groningen University and assistant professor at Stanford University. She is currently a Professor in French linguistics and semantics at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on cross-linguistic variation in meaning particularly in regards to tense and aspect, negation, bare nominals and indefinite noun phrases. She has also investigated the role of semantics in language evolution, and was involved in the development of bidirectional optimality theory.
She has been the director of the Netherlands Graduate School of linguistics and of the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics. In 2013, she was nominated to membership of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. de Swart is an associate editor of the journal Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. She is also a member of the editorial board of Linguistics and Philosophy, Semantics and Pragmatics, Language and Linguistic Compass, Travaux de Linguistique, and the Catalan Journal of Linguistics.

Selected publications