Carl Pollard is a Professor of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. He is the co-inventor of Head-driven phrase structure grammar and author of numerous books and articles on formal syntax and semantics. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... The Ohio State University (legal name), also known as Ohio State or OSU, is currently the largest public university in the United States and ranked by US News as the best public university in Ohio and the twenty-first best public university in the nation. ... The Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a non-derivational generative grammar theory developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag (1985). ... The first meaning of the term syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (sun, meaning ‘together’) and ταξις (taxis, meaning sequence/order), can be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ...