He graduated with a BA in English from University College London (UCL) in 1989.
He followed this with an MA in Modern English Language and a PhD in Linguistics on topics at the intersection of syntax and lexical semantics, both from UCL.
He began his academic career as a Teaching Fellow at the University of Cambridge in 1994.
He then moved to the post of Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong in 1997.
He came to Edinburgh in 2002 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2006.
Professor Gisborne is the author of a monograph ‘The Event Structure of Perception Verbs’ (2010) and several published papers.
His research is in lexical and conceptual semantics and syntax, with a focus on English and its diachrony.
He has particular research interests in the argument structure of verbs, predication, definiteness, and relative clauses.
He works in, and on, the monostratal declarative dependency framework Word Grammar to account for a range of phenomena without the need to posit theoretical constructs such as movement.
His work on diachrony is concerned with how to account for the appearance of directionality in language change, and the evolution of typologically rare constructions.