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. Ling ...

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 Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

. From 1994 to 2005 he was successively research fellow, lecturer, reader and professor in Linguistics at the

University of Manchester The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The university owns and operates majo ...

, 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) (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 {{US-linguist-stub