Sir John Lyons, LittD, FBA (born 1932) is an English linguist, most famous for his work on semantics.[1]
John Lyons was educated at St Bede's College, Manchester, and at 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 he returned to Cambridge as a Ph.D student in 1956. His supervisor was Sydney 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 university post in linguistics that was rare in those days in Britain. Lyons moved from Cambridge to SOAS in London, and R. H. Robins became 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 his very first 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.[2] 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 are very widely read, notably Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics, Chomsky, Semantics, and Linguistic Semantics.
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Theodore Morris Sugden |
Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge 1986–2000 |
Succeeded by Peter Clarke |