Pius ten Hacken studied French and general linguistics in Utrecht and has worked for the machine translation project Eurotra and at universities in Basel (computer science and general linguistics), Swansea (French and translation studies), and Innsbruck (translation studies). His research interests focus on word formation, terminology, lexicography and the nature of language as an object of linguistic study. He is the author of Defining Morphology (1994) and Chomskyan Linguistics and its Competitors (2007), the editor of Terminology, Computing and Translation (2006), and co-editor of The Semantics of Word Formation and Lexicalization (2013).