Sir John Lyons, LittD

Doctor of Letters

Doctor of Letters is a university academic degree, often a higher doctorate which is frequently awarded as an honorary degree in recognition of outstanding scholarship or other merits.-Commonwealth:...

, FBA

British Academy

The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national body for the humanities and the social sciences. Its purpose is to inspire, recognise and support excellence in the humanities and social sciences, throughout the UK and internationally, and to champion their role and value.It receives an annual...

 (born 1932) is an English linguist, most famous for his work on semantics

Semantics

Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....

.

John Lyons was educated at St Bede's College, Manchester

St Bede's College, Manchester

St Bede's College, Manchester is an independent Roman Catholic day school situated on Alexandra Road South in the Whalley Range area of the city, and is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference....

, and at Christ's College, Cambridge

Christ's College, Cambridge

Christ's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.With a reputation for high academic standards, Christ's College averaged top place in the Tompkins Table from 1980-2000 . In 2011, Christ's was placed sixth.-College history:...

, where he took a degree in Classics

Classics

Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...

 in 1953 and a Diploma in Education in 1954. After doing his national service

Conscription in the United Kingdom

Conscription in the United Kingdom has existed for two periods in modern times. The first was from 1916 to 1919, the second was from 1939 to 1960, with the last conscripted soldiers leaving the service in 1963...

 in the navy

Royal Navy

The Royal Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the British Armed Forces. Founded in the 16th century, it is the oldest service branch and is known as the Senior Service...

 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

School of Oriental and African Studies

The School of Oriental and African Studies is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom and a constituent college of the University of London...

. 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

R. H. Robins

Professor Robert H. Robins , affectionately known to his close ones as Bobby Robins, was a British linguist. Before his retirement, he spent his entire career at the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.Robin's work in...

 became his PhD supervisor. In the summer of 1960 Lyons went to Indiana University

Indiana University

Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

 to work in a machine translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

 project; he was chosen because of his expertise in Russian and linguistics. It was at Indiana, in a post-Bloomfieldean

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...

 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

Journal of Linguistics

The Journal of Linguistics is a peer-reviewed journal in linguistics, and the official publication of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. It has been published by Cambridge University Press since 1965, and covers all branches of theoretical linguistics. The current editors are Nigel Fabb...

. From 1964 to 1984 he was a professor of linguistics at the universities of Edinburgh

University of Edinburgh

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...

 and Sussex

University of Sussex

The University of Sussex is an English public research university situated next to the East Sussex village of Falmer, within the city of Brighton and Hove. The University received its Royal Charter in August 1961....

. For 15 years he was master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge

Trinity Hall, Cambridge

Trinity Hall is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. It is the fifth-oldest college of the university, having been founded in 1350 by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich.- Foundation :...

, 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.

Selected works

• Structural Semantics (1964)
• Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics (1968)
• Chomsky (Fontana Modern Masters
  Fontana Modern Masters
  The Fontana Modern Masters was a series of pocket guides on the writers, philosophers, and other thinkers and theorists whose ideas were shaping the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century. The first five titles were published on 12 January 1970 by Fontana Books, the paperback imprint of...
  
  , 1970)
• New Horizons in Linguistics (1970) (as editor)
• Semantics, Volumes 1 and 2 (1977)
• Language and Linguistics (1981)
• Language, Meaning and Context (1981)
• New Horizons in Linguistics 2 (1987) (as co-editor)
• Natural Language and Universal Grammar (1991)
• Linguistic Semantics: An introduction (1995)