After working for the BBC Monitoring Service during the Second World War, Ullmann gained an appointment as lecturer in
Philology and
Linguistics at the University of Glasgow in 1946. He was promoted to a senior lectureship in 1950, after having graduated
DLitt on 5 November 1949 with the thesis titled "The Principles of Semantics" which had a profound influence on the Linguistics field. Ullmann later taught at the
University of Leeds where he was
Professor of
French Language and
Romance Philology from 1953 to 1968, and at
Oxford University. In 1974 he spent five months as a visitor at the Australian National University's department of Romance languages, where he lectured on "Words and their meanings". Ullmann's ideas on semantics are said to be backed up by a wealth of published materials from across Europe. In addition, his works were translated into a variety of languages, such as French, Russian, Japanese and Spanish ==Death==