John Lyons (linguist)
| Sir John Lyons | |
|---|---|
| Born |
John Lyons 23 May 1932 Stretford, Manchester, England |
| Alma mater | Christ's College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | English linguist |
Sir John Lyons, LittD, FBA (born 23 May 1932), is an English linguist, working on semantics.
John Lyons was born and brought up in Stretford, Manchester. He was initially educated at St Ann's RC School, Stretford before winning a scholarship to St Bede's College, Manchester, joining at September 1943. In July 1950, Lyons progressed to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he took a degree in Classics in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954.
After doing his national service in the navy for two years, studying Russian as a Coder (Special), and commissioned as a Midshipman, he returned to Cambridge as a PhD student in 1956. His supervisor was W. Sidney Allen. The following year he was made a lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He was also awarded a one-year Rockefeller Scholarship to Yale, but declined for the more opportunistic academic position in linguistics that was rare in those days in Britain. Lyons moved from Cambridge to SOAS in London, where R. H. Robins was his PhD supervisor. In the summer of 1960, Lyons went to Indiana University to work in a machine translation project; he was chosen because of his expertise in Russian and linguistics. It was at Indiana, in a post-Bloomfieldean milieu, where Lyons gave courses on general linguistics.
In 1961, he returned to Christ's College, where he taught until 1964. Between 1965 and 1969, he was the founder editor of the Journal of Linguistics. From 1964 to 1984, he was professor of linguistics at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex. He was master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge for 15 years, before retiring in 2000; he is now an honorary fellow at the college. He was knighted in 1987.
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