David Willis | |
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| Born | David W. E. Willis |
| Occupation(s) | Linguist and academic |
| Title | Jesus Professor of Celtic |
| Academic background | |
| Thesis | The loss of verb-second in Welsh: Study of syntactic change (1996) |
| Doctoral advisor | Ellis Evans |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Celtic languages andlinguistics |
| Institutions | Somerville College, Oxford University of Manchester Selwyn College, Cambridge Jesus College, Oxford |
| Main interests | language change andsyntax |
| Notable works | The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean |
David W. E. Willis is alinguist andCelticist. In 2020 he took up the post ofJesus Professor of Celtic at theUniversity of Oxford.[1] He had previously held posts inhistorical linguistics at theUniversity of Manchester[2] and at theUniversity of Cambridge, where he was a Fellow ofSelwyn College.[3]
He was a Junior Research Fellow atSomerville College, Oxford. In 2022, he was elected aFellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[4]
Willis completed a BA in Russian and German and an MPhil in General Linguistics atSt John's College, Oxford before transferring to Jesus College for his DPhil on the history of word order in the Welsh language, completed in 1996.[5]Ellis Evans, one of Willis's predecessors in the Jesus Chair of Celtic, served as his doctoral supervisor.[6]
Willis's research is in the areas oflanguage change andsyntax, with particular reference to theCeltic andSlavic languages as well as toEnglish. The synchronic and diachronic syntax ofWelsh has been a particular focus: his first book was on the loss ofverb-second in the history of Welsh, and he has co-authored a textbook on the syntax of the present-day language. He is also an expert in the syntax ofnegation and onJespersen's cycle cross-linguistically.[3]
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