Andrew Radford (linguist)

Andrew Radford
Born(1945-07-03)July 3, 1945
Woking
Alma materTrinity College, Cambridge
Known forGenerative grammar, Principles and Parameters of language development, structure building model of child language acquisition
Scientific career
FieldsGenerative grammar, syntax, child language acquisition
InstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge, University of Oxford, University of East Anglia, University College of North Wales, University of Essex
Doctoral advisorPieter Seuren: a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics at Nijmegen

Andrew Radford is a British linguist known for his work in syntax and child language acquisition. His first important contribution to the field was a 1977 book on Italian syntax.[1] He achieved international recognition in 1981 for his book Transformational Syntax, which sold over 30,000 copies and was the standard introduction to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for many years; and this was followed by an introduction to transformational grammar in 1988,[2] which sold over 70,000. He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky, a number of which have appeared in the series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

In the 1990s, Radford was a pioneer of the maturation-based structure building model of child language, and the acquisition of functional categories in early child English within the Principles and Parameters framework,[3][4] in which children are seen as gradually building up more and more complex structures, with lexical categories (like noun and verb) being acquired before functional-syntactic categories (like determiner and complementiser): this research resulted in the publication of a monograph on Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax in 1990, and numerous articles on the acquisition of syntax by monolingual, bilingual and language-disordered children.

Since 2010, Radford has researched the syntax of colloquial English, using data recorded from unscripted radio and TV broadcasts. He produced a research monograph on this, and a number of articles, and is preparing a follow-up research monograph on the syntax of relative clauses in colloquial English.[5][6]

Since January 2014, Radford has been an Emeritus Professor of the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.[7]

  1. ^ Rebecca Posner (1978). "Review: Italian Syntax: Transformational and Relational Grammar". Journal of Linguistics. 14 (2): 356–366. JSTOR 4175462.
  2. ^ Baltin, Mark (25 September 1990). "Review: Transformational Grammar". Language. 66 (3): 569–573. doi:10.2307/414616. JSTOR 414616.
  3. ^ James Russell (2004). What is Language Development. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-2632487.
  4. ^ Anne Vainikka and Martha Young-Scholten (2011). The Acquisition of German. Walter de Gruyter. ISBN 978-3-11-026376-3.
  5. ^ See (2012a, 2013, 2015b) within "Other selected publications".
  6. ^ Colloquial English: Structure and Variation, Cambridge University Press. Accessed 10 January 2018.
  7. ^ "People: Professor Andrew Radford". University of Essex.