Professor David Willis joins us as the Jesus Chair of Celtic

The Faculty would like to warmly welcome Professor David Willis who is joining the University as the Jesus Chair of Celtic. He was formerly at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Professor Willis specialises in historical linguistics and in theoretical and dialect syntax, working primarily on material from Celtic and Slavonic languages (especially Breton, Bulgarian, Russian and Welsh). He is interested in the mechanisms of syntactic change, particularly theoretical approaches to degrammaticalisation and exaptation, in syntactic reconstruction, and in the use of electronic corpora in historical linguistics (e.g., Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language 1500-1850). He has recently begun looking at ongoing variation and change in contemporary Welsh, as part of the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects.

Professor Miriam Meyerhoff appointed as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College

The Faculty is delighted that Professor Miriam Meyerhoff has been appointed as Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College. She is currently Professor of Sociolinguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies. Her long-standing research interests include language variation and change in its broadest perspective and how social ideologies influence language use. She has specialised in the languages of Vanuatu and contact languages of the Pacific and Caribbean. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand/He Ahurei a Te Apārangi and in 2020, she was elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

Dr Daniel Altshuler appointmented as our new Associate Professor of Semantics

We are delighted to announce the appointment of our new Associate Professor of Semantics, Dr Daniel Altshuler who will be holding a Tutorial Fellowship at Jesus College and a Lectureship at Brasenose College, Oxford.Dr Altshuler obtained his PhD in Linguistics from Rutgers University, USA. His primary research interests are in the areas of semantics and pragmatics in natural languages and he has been investigating how compositional semantics interacts with discourse structure and discourse coherence. His first monograph on the interpretation of narrative discourse has just been published by De Gruyter.