Andrew Radford (linguist)

Since January 2014, Radford has been an Emeritus Professor of the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.

Since 2010, Radford has researched the syntax of colloquial English, using data recorded from unscripted radio and TV broadcasts. He produced a research monograph on this, and a number of articles, and is preparing a follow-up research monograph on the syntax of relative clauses in colloquial English.

In the 1990s, Radford was a pioneer of the maturation-based structure building model of child language, and the acquisition of functional categories in early child English within the Principles and Parameters framework, in which children are seen as gradually building up more and more complex structures, with lexical categories (like noun and verb) being acquired before functional-syntactic categories (like determiner and complementiser): this research resulted in the publication of a monograph on Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax in 1990, and numerous articles on the acquisition of syntax by monolingual, bilingual and language-disordered children.

In his 1990 book, Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax, Radford summarizes the state of a maturation hypothesis for child language acquisition. Working within the principles and parameters framework as his point of departure, and drawing from previous work done by Hagit Borer and Kenneth Wexler on the apparent absence of A-chains in early grammar, Radford proposed a structure-building model focused (inter alia) on the lack of syntactic movement-operations in the early multi-word stage of child English syntax, viz. the lack of inflectional morphology. This led to an analysis that described children as gradually building up increasingly complex structure, with Lexical/thematic stage-1 (lexical categories like noun and verb) preceding Functional/syntactic stage-2 (functional categories like determiner and complementiser).

Andrew Radford is a British linguist known for his work in syntax and child language acquisition. His first important contribution to the field was a 1977 book on Italian syntax. He achieved international recognition in 1981 for his book Transformational Syntax, which sold over 30,000 copies and was the standard introduction to Chomsky's Government and Binding Theory for many years; and this was followed by an introduction to transformational grammar in 1988, which sold over 70,000. He has since published several books on syntax within the framework of generative grammar and the Minimalist Program of Noam Chomsky, a number of which have appeared in the series Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.

Radford was a Research Fellow in Linguistics at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1971 to 1975, before taking up posts as lecturer in Linguistics in the School of English & American Studies at the University of East Anglia (1975–76), Lecturer in Linguistics in the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages at the University of Oxford (1976–78), and Reader in Linguistics in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex (1978–80). In 1980, he became Professor of Linguistics at the University College of North Wales, serving first as Head of the Department of Linguistics (1980–87), and later as Head of the School of Modern Languages and Linguistics (1987–89). In 1989, he returned to the University of Essex as Professor of Linguistics, where he served three terms as Head of the Department of Language and Linguistics, and one as Dean of the School of Humanities and Comparative Studies. He retired at the end of 2013, and has been Emeritus Professor at Essex since then.