Laurence Horn received his PhD at UCLA under the supervision of Barbara Partee. His 1972 dissertation, On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators in English, introduced the notion of scalar implicature. He has taught at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Southern California, Aix-Marseille, and Wisconsin, and at linguistic institutes at Stanford, U.C. Santa Cruz, Illinois, Michigan State, and Ljubljana.
Since 1981 he has served on the faculty of Yale University, where he is currently Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy. He has been a plenary speaker at linguistics and philosophy conferences in Belgium, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Switzerland, and Sweden.
He is the author of A Natural History of Negation (Chicago, 1989/CSLI, 2001) and numerous papers and encyclopedia entries on negation, implicature, lexical semantics, logic, and pragmatic theory and is the editor of Negation and Polarity (with Yasuhiko Kato; Oxford, 2000), The Handbook of Pragmatics (with Gregory Ward; Blackwell, 2004), Explorations in Pragmatics (with Istvan Kecskes; de Gruyter, 2007) and The Expression of Negation (de Gruyter, 2010).
He is an active member of the American Dialect Society and the Linguistic Society of America and was elected a Fellow of the LSA.