David Willis (linguist)

Willis completed a BA in Russian and German and an MPhil in General Linguistics at St 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. Ellis Evans, one of Willis's predecessors in the Jesus Chair of Celtic, served as his doctoral supervisor. ==Research==

Willis's research is in the areas of language change and syntax, with particular reference to the Celtic and Slavic languages as well as to English. The synchronic and diachronic syntax of Welsh has been a particular focus: his first book was on the loss of verb-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 of negation and on Jespersen's cycle cross-linguistically. ==Selected publications==

• Willis, David. 1998. Syntactic change in Welsh: A study of the loss of verb-second. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Willis, David. 2000. On the distribution of resumptive pronouns and wh-trace in Welsh. Journal of Linguistics 36(3), 531–573. • Borsley, Robert, Maggie Tallerman, and David Willis. 2007. The syntax of Welsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. • Willis, David. 2007. Syntactic lexicalization as a new type of degrammaticalization. Linguistics 45(2), 271–310. • Breitbarth, Anne, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts, and David Willis (eds.). 2009. Continuity and change in grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. • Willis, David, Christopher Lucas, and Anne Breitbarth (eds.). 2013. The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, Volume I: Case studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. • Breitbarth, Anne, David Willis, and Christopher Lucas (eds.). 2020. The history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean, Volume II: Patterns and processes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ==References==