Pesetsky taught at the
University of Southern California and the
University of Massachusetts Amherst before joining the faculty of MIT in 1988. Pesetsky was elected a
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2011, and a Fellow of the
Linguistic Society of America in 2013. He has published articles and books within the framework of
generative grammar. A specialist in
syntax, he has published on the cross-linguistic properties of
wh-movement as well as the theory of
argument structure. In a collaboration with
Esther Torrego, he developed a theory of
grammatical case in
noun phrases, arguing that
nominative and
accusative cases are the mirror image for the nominal system of
phi feature agreement in the verbal system. He has worked extensively on the structure of Russian, and recently has argued (in collaboration with
Jonah Katz) that the syntax of tonal music is identical to the structure of language. In an article coauthored with
Andrew Nevins and
Cilene Rodrigues, Pesetsky criticized claims by
Daniel Everett concerning the
Pirahã language, touching off a protracted debate in the pages of the journal
Language. ==Notes==