John Lyons (linguist)

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For other persons named John Lyons, see John Lyons (disambiguation).

Sir John Lyons (born 1932) is a British linguist, most famous for his work on semantics.

John Lyons was educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, and at Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was also employed from 1961 to 1964. From 1964 to 1984 he was a professor of linguistics at the universities of Edinburgh and Sussex. For 15 years he was master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before retiring in 2000; he is now an honorary fellow at the college. In 1987 he was knighted.

Lyons' introductory texts, admirably written, are very widely read, notably Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Chomsky, Semantics and Linguistic Semantics.