William Croft (born November 13, 1956) is an American professor of
linguistics
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 ...
at the
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico (UNM; es, Universidad de Nuevo México) is a public research university in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Founded in 1889, it is the state's flagship academic institution and the largest by enrollment, with over 25,400 ...
,
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
. From 1994 to 2005 he was successively research fellow, lecturer, reader and professor in Linguistics at the
University of Manchester
, mottoeng = Knowledge, Wisdom, Humanity
, established = 2004 – University of Manchester Predecessor institutions: 1956 – UMIST (as university college; university 1994) 1904 – Victoria University of Manchester 1880 – Victoria Univer ...
, UK.
He is the inventor of and advocate for
radical construction grammar, which among other things uses box-diagrams to compare and contrast the grammatical features of different
natural language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...
s. He is considered an influential scholar in the fields of functional and cognitive linguistics.
William Croft is a member of
Save the Redwoods League
Save the Redwoods League is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to protect and restore coast redwood (''Sequoia sempervirens'') and giant sequoia (''Sequoiadendron giganteum'') trees through the preemptive purchase of development rights ...
's Board of Councillors.
[http://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACCV.html http://www.savetheredwoods.org/league/staff.shtml]
Partial bibliography
* Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information (1991)
* Explaining language change: an evolutionary approach (2001)
* Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective (2001)
* Typology and Universals, 2nd ed. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics) (2003)
** 1st ed. (1990)
* Cognitive Linguistics (
Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...
) (2004) with
D. A. Cruse
* Verbs: aspect and causal structure (2012)
References
External links
Faculty page at the University of New Mexico
1956 births
Linguists from the United States
Syntacticians
Living people
University of New Mexico faculty
Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America
20th-century linguists
20th-century American academics
21st-century linguists
21st-century American academics
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