Brief Biography
Ruth Kempson Fellow of British Academy, Member of Academia Europaea
Emerita Professor of Linguistics of King’s College London
Honorary Research Associate of SOAS, the Cognitive Science research unit of QMUL, and CLASP.
From 1970 to 1998 I taught Semantics at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and from 1999-2009 I was Professor of Linguistics in the Philosophy Department of King’s College (KCL). Throughout this period I worked on the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as part of a long-term interest on the intermingling of linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of interpretation. With Wilfried Meyer-Viol and Dov Gabbay I set out the Dynamic Syntax (DS) framework, which in its development has attracted a number of people who have helped to provide substance to a radical rethinking of the foundations of language. In DS, languages are defined as systems of conditional context-dependent actions underpinning and reflecting the incrementality of all language processing, all such actions constituting affordances in the sense of Rietveld et al 2018. This emergent work has been funded by a number of research projects, in particular a collaborative project with Pat Healey and colleagues at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), and with Wilfried Meyer-Viol at KCL: The Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue (ESRC) and a Dialogue Matters project (Leverhulme). Notable contributors to the framework amongst many others have been CLASP colleagues Eleni Gregoromichelaki, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, and Christine Howes. This project has been a notable team effort, the sum very much more than any of us could have achieved alone: I feel honoured and delighted at having been part of such a collaborative and ever evolving project.