Personal Chair: Ronnie Cann

Ronnie Cann has been made Personal Chair in Linguistics Semantics.

He began his academic career as a classical philologist with a BA in Classics from University College London (UCL) in 1976.

He followed this with a Diploma in Linguistics from UCL in 1979 and finally a DPhil from the University of Sussex in 1984 on the formal syntactic and semantic analysis of 5th century BC Attic Greek.

He came to the University of Edinburgh on a six-month contract in January 1984, was appointed lecturer in October of that year, and became a Senior Lecturer in 1994 and Reader in 2006.

He is the author and co-author of three books, Formal Semantics (1993), The Dynamics of Language (2005) and Semantics (2009), and many published papers.

His research is in the formal semantics and syntax of natural languages and the use of the parsing-based framework Dynamic Syntax to account for a range of linguistic phenomena without the need to posit levels of representation beyond that of logical form, with specific interest in the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the English auxiliary systemthe function of overt case-making and meta-level concepts, such as the notion of linguistic well-formedness and the representation of linguistic knowledge.