Janet Dean Fodor

Janet Dean Fodor (born 1942) is Distinguished Professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition.

Life

Born Janet Dean, she received her B.A. in 1964 and her M.A. in 1966, both from Oxford University. At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their 'equilibrium hypothesis' for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels. She received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT, looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality.

In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Janet Dean

Janet Elizabeth Ann Dean (born 28 January 1949) is a British Labour Party politician who was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Burton from 1997 to 2010.

Born Janet Gibson in Crewe, she was educated at the Verdin Grammar School in Winsford. On leaving school in 1965 she became a clerk at Barclays Bank, before moving to Bass Charrington in 1969. She married Alan Dean in 1968 and became a full-time mother in 1970 following the birth of the first of their two daughters. She was widowed in 1994.

Politics

She was elected as a councillor to the Staffordshire County Council in 1981 and to the East Staffordshire District Council in 1991, becoming its mayor in 1996. She was also elected to the Uttoxeter Town Council in 1995. She stepped down from all three councils on her election to Westminster.

Dean was selected to stand for election for Labour through an all-women shortlist. She was elected to the House of Commons in the 1997 General Election, winning Burton from the sitting Conservative MP, Ivan Lawrence, by 6,330 votes. She made her maiden speech on 30 July 1997. In parliament she was a member of the Catering Select Committee from her election until 2005. She was a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee from 1999, and since the 2005 General Election she has also been a member of the Speaker's Panel of Chairmen.