Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics

  

Dr James Blevins received an honours BA in English and Philosophy from Bishop's University in 1983 and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1990, where his thesis dealt with discontinuous and overlapping syntactic dependencies. From 1989–92 he was a member of the technical staff at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation. From 1992–96 he was a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Western Australia and coordinator of the Cognitive Science Programme. He joined the Centre in 1997. He has been a visiting associate professor at UC, Berkeley, a visiting assistant professor at UT, Austin and the University of Alberta, and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.

He is the syntax editor for the second edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, a member of the council of the Philological Society and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Linguistics. Ongoing research approaches a range of mainly syntactic and morphological topics from a traditional perspective that incorporates a word-based conception of morphology and descriptivist views of phrase and clause structure.