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]