David Denison

For the Canadian businessman, see David F. Denison.

David Michael Benjamin Denison FBA (born 6 September 1950)[1] is a British linguist whose work focuses on the history of the English language.

Biography

He was educated at Highgate School^[citation needed] and St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and then Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic,[2] completing the latter tripos with an upper second-class degree in 1973.[3] He earned his doctorate at Lincoln College, Oxford on "Aspects of the History of English Group-Verbs, with Particular Attention to the Syntax of the Ormulum".[2][4] He was Smith Professor of English Language & Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester from 2008. Since March 2015 he has been Professor Emeritus of English Linguistics.[2] He is a past president of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE).[5]

Denison served from 1995 to 2010 as one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics.[6] In 2014 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University.[7][8] In 2014 he was also elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[9]

He is one of the contributors to The Cambridge grammar of the English language.

Selected publications

• R. Hogg, D. Denison (eds.). 2006. A History of the English Language. Cambridge Univ. Press.
• B. Aarts, D. Denison, E. Keizer, G. Popova (eds.) 2004. Fuzzy Grammar: a reader. Oxford Univ. Press.
• D. Denison. 1999. "Gradience and linguistic change". In Historical Linguistics. Ed. L. Brinton. John Benjamins.
• D. Denison. 1998. "Syntax". In The Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. IV: 1776–1997. Ed. S. Romaine. Cambridge Univ. Press, pp. 92–329.
• D. Denison. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. Longman.[10][11]

References

1. "Denison, Prof. David Michael Benjamin", Who's Who (online edition, Oxford University Press, December 2017). Retrieved 5 July 2018.
2. "Prof David Denison". Retrieved 7 September 2016.
3. 'Appendix V. Candidates who Took the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic Tripos between 1900 and 1999', in H. M. Chadwick and the Study of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in Cambridge, ed. by Michael Lapidge [=Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 69–70] (Aberystwyth: Department of Welsh, Abersytwyth University, 2015), pp. 257–66 (p. 262).
4. Denison, David. "Aspects of the history of English group-verbs" (PDF). Retrieved 7 September 2016.
5. "ISLE - The International Society for the Linguistics of English". Isle-linguistics.org. 20 October 2010. Archived from the original on 26 July 2014. Retrieved 21 July 2014.
6. Aarts, Bas, David Denison and Richard Hogg (May 1997). "Editors' Notes". English Language and Linguistics. 1 (1): 1–2. doi:10.1017/S1360674300000320.
7. Department of English (26 February 2014). "Honorary Doctors - Uppsala University, Sweden". Engelska.uu.se. Archived from the original on 12 August 2014. Retrieved 21 July 2014.
8. "Languages name two new honorary doctors - Uppsala University, Sweden". www.uu.se. Retrieved 2 February 2016.
9. "British Academy announces 42 new fellows". Times Higher Education. 18 July 2014. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
10. Fischer, Olga (March 1994). "Review of English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions". Journal of Linguistics. 30 (1): 277–281. doi:10.1017/s0022226700016285. S2CID 146399253.
11. Stockwell, Robert P. (December 1997). "Review of English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions". Language. 73 (4): 858–860. doi:10.1353/lan.1997.0019. S2CID 144863852.