Ronnie Cann

Professor Emeritus

Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Street: Room 2.10, Dugald Stewart Building
City: 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AD

Biography

Background

I graduated from UCL with a BA in Classics in 1976. After taking a diploma in Linguistics at UCL with distinction in 1979, I moved to the University of Sussex, graduating with a DPhil in 1985, having spent many years in the Reading Room of the British Museum writing a semantically compositional phrase structure grammar for a fragment of 5th/4th century Attic Greek, whilst also working at the National Theatre in London.

I came to the University of Edinburgh as a temporary lecturer in January 1984 and somehow forgot to leave. I became Senior Lecturer in 1994, Reader in 2006 and, somewhat belatedly, Professor in 2012.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

My teaching principally concerns linguistic semantics at Honours (Lexical Semantics; Current Issues in Semantics and Pragmatics). At pre-honours levels I have taught syntax and some morphology in Linguistics and English Language 1, semantics in Linguistics and English Language 2A and Indo-European and the Romance languages in Linguistics and English Language 2E.