Gillian Ramchand is a

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...

and Professor of Linguistics at the

University of Tromsø The University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway (Norwegian: ''Universitetet i Tromsø – Norges arktiske universitet''; Northern Sami: ''Romssa universitehta – Norgga árktalaš universitehta'') is a state university in Norway an ...

, Norway.

Biography

Ramchand grew up in

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

and

Trinidad Trinidad is the larger and more populous of the two major islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The island lies off the northeastern coast of Venezuela and sits on the continental shelf of South America. It is often referred to as the southernmos ...

and received her PhD in linguistics from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1994, with a dissertation entitled, "Aspect and Argument Structure in Modern Scottish Gaelic." She subsequently spent 10 years working at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

as a lecturer in general linguistics before moving to Tromsø in 2004, where she became full professor two years later in 2006. Her widely cited research focuses on the

syntax 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) ...

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

interface, especially

argument structure In logic, logical form of a statement is a precisely-specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambigu ...

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She has worked on a variety of languages, including

Scottish Gaelic Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well as ...

Bengali Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to: *something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia * Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region * Bengali language, the language they speak ** Bengali alphabet, the w ...

, and

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

Honors and distinctions

Since 2017 Ramchand has been President of

Generative Linguistics in the Old World GLOW is an international organization to further the study of generative grammar, founded in 1977 and based in the Netherlands. Its activities include its annual spring linguistics conference and periodic summer schools. In the past, GLOW published ...

(GLOW).

Selected publications

* Ramchand, Gillian. 1997. ''Aspect and predication: The semantics of argument structure''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Adger, David, and Ramchand, Gillian. 2005. Merge and Move: ''Wh''-dependencies revisited. ''Linguistic Inquiry'' 36(2), 161–193. * Ramchand, Gillian, and Reiss, Charles. 2007. ''The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces''. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. ''Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first phase syntax''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Ramchand, Gillian, and Svenonius, Peter. 2014. Deriving the functional hierarchy. ''Language Sciences'' 46, 152–174. * Ramchand, Gillian. 2018. ''Situations and syntactic structures: Rethinking auxiliaries and order in English''. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

References

Women linguists Living people Academic staff of the University of Tromsø Semanticists Syntacticians Year of birth missing (living people) {{linguist-stub