Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

   

David Willis specialises in historical linguistics and theoretical syntax, working primarily on material from Celtic and Slavonic languages (especially Breton, Bulgarian, Russian and Welsh). He has published a book on word order change in Welsh (Syntactic change in Welsh: A study of the loss of verb-second, 1998, OUP) and a volume co-written with Bob Borsley (Essex) and Maggie Tallerman (Newcastle) entitled The syntax of Welsh (2007, CUP). He is currently finishing up, with Anne Breitbarth (Ghent) and Chris Lucas (SOAS) an AHRC-funded project on the history of negation across European languages (especially Jespersen's Cycle), and has recently begun looking at ongoing variation and change in contemporary Welsh, as part of the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects. He is also interested in the mechanisms of syntactic change, particularly theoretical approaches to degrammaticalisation and exaptation, in syntactic reconstruction, and in the use of electronic corpora in historical linguistics (as part of the Historical Corpus of the Welsh language 1500-1850.