Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists, tend to share certain working assumptions such as the competence–performance distinction and the notion that some domain-specific aspects of grammar are partly innate in humans. These assumptions are rejected in non-generative approaches such as usage-based models of language. Generative linguistics includes work in core areas such as syntax, semantics, phonology, psycholinguistics, and language acquisition, with additional extensions to topics including biolinguistics and music cognition.
David Crystal, is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of the English language.
Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book A Course in Phonetics is a common introductory text in phonetics, and The Sounds of the World's Languages is widely regarded as a standard phonetics reference. Ladefoged also wrote several books on the phonetics of African languages. Prior to UCLA, he was a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria (1959–60).
Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and emeritus professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.
Lyle Richard Campbell is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in general. Campbell is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Bernard Bloch was an American linguist. He taught at Brown University and was Professor of Linguistics at Yale University.
The Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) is an association which claims to be the leading professional association for academic linguists there.
Patrick Donald Rayfield OBE is an English academic and Emeritus Professor of Russian and Georgian at Queen Mary University of London. He is an author of books about Russian and Georgian literature, and about Joseph Stalin and his secret police. He is also a series editor for books about Russian writers and intelligentsia. He has translated Georgian, Russian and Uzbek poets and prose writers.
Hagit Borer is a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research falls within the area of Generative Grammar.
Elizabeth Closs Traugott is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization.
Elisabet Britt Engdahl is a Swedish linguist and professor emerita of Swedish at the University of Gothenburg. She was the first linguist to investigate parasitic gaps in detail.
Peter Kenneth Austin, often cited as Peter K. Austin, is an Australian linguist, widely published in the fields of language documentation, syntax, linguistic typology and in particular, endangered languages and language revitalisation. After a long academic career in Australia, Hong Kong, the US, Japan, Germany and the UK, Austin is emeritus professor at SOAS University of London since retiring in December 2018.
Caroline Heycock is a Scottish syntactician and professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Karattuparambil Achuthan Jayaseelan is an Indian linguist, essayist and a poet of Malayalam literature. He is known for his poems characterized by philosophical thoughts and his contributions to the linguistics of South Indian languages.
Sabine Iatridou is a linguist whose research investigates the syntax‐semantics interface. Her research has helped to delineate theories of tense and modality.
Rachel Hewitt is a writer of creative non-fiction, and lecturer in creative writing at Newcastle University.
Gillian Ramchand is a linguist who specializes in syntax, semantics, and the syntax-semantics interface. As of 2024, she is Professor of Syntax and Semantics at Magdalen College, University of Oxford.
Jennifer Smith, PhD, FRSE is a sociolinguistic specialist in language variation and dialects, especially Scottish dialects across the generations and geography of Scotland, including developing the Scottish syntax atlas which analyses the diversity. Her research also covers variations in colonial English, for example, in North America. Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies, she teaches and researches language and variation theory.
Jennifer Culbertson is a professor in the department of Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. She is a founding member of the Centre for Language Evolution, with her research focusing on how typological universals are shaped by properties of human cognition. Culbertson is best known for her work investigating universals of word order and morphological categories using the experimental method of Artificial Language Learning.
