In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Geoffrey Keith Pullum is a British and American linguist specialising in the study of English. Pullum has published over 300 articles and books on various topics in linguistics, including phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language. He is Professor Emeritus of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.
Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.
Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor 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.
Adriaan Dirk Neeleman is a Dutch linguist based in the UK. He is Professor of Linguistics at University College London.
Arnold Melchior Zwicky is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. The Linguistic Society of America’s Arnold Zwicky Award, given for the first time in 2021, is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ President of the LSA.
In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data.
The Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB) is an association which claims to be the leading professional association for academic linguists there.
A resumptive pronoun is a personal pronoun appearing in a relative clause, which restates the antecedent after a pause or interruption, as in This is the girli that whenever it rains shei cries.
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.
Gabriella Hermon is an American linguist, professor emerita at the University of Delaware.
Lyn Frazier (born October 15, 1952, in Madison, Wisconsin) is an experimental linguist, focusing on psycholinguistic research of adult sentence comprehension. She is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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.
Jason Kandybowicz is an American linguist, since 2022 Full Professor of Linguistics at The Graduate Center, CUNY He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2006 as an advisee of Hilda Koopman. Kandybowicz has researched several endangered and understudied West African languages, including Nupe, Krachi, Ikpana and Asante Twi. Working within the generative grammar framework, he has written several important books and scientific journal articles about Niger-Congo languages and the syntax-phonology interface. He has made a number of media appearances, including interviews for podcasts and the British Broadcasting Company
Gillian Ramchand is a linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Tromsø, Norway.
Lutz Marten is a German linguist and africanist. He is currently professor of general and African linguistics at SOAS University of London. Since 2020, he is also the editor of the Transactions of the Philological Society.
Tara Mohanan is a linguist and co-founder of ThinQ, an educational organisation. She is known for work on Hindi, Malayalam, and other South Asian languages in the fields of semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology. Her husband is linguist K. P. Mohanan.
