Nikolas Gisborne

I'm usually known as Nik Gisborne.

From September 2022 to August 2025, I shall be on long-term research leave working on a project funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, called ‘Simple grammars, relative clauses and language change’. There's more information under the Research tab.

I was educated at University College London, in the English Department (BA, MA) and the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics (PhD). My first job was at the University of Cambridge from 1994-1997. From there, I moved to the University of Hong Kong, coming to Edinburgh in January 2002. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2006, and to a Chair in 2012.

I’ve held various roles in my time here: I’ve been School Undergraduate Studies Director; Linguistics and English Language (LEL)’s Honours Convenor; LEL’s Post-graduate Director; and I served as Head of LEL from 2017-2020. I was heavily involved in the rewriting of the LEL undergraduate curriculum in the light of the university-wide ‘curriculum project’ many years ago; and I wrote both the MSc English Language and the MSc Linguistics. In 2016, I established the PPLS Skills Centre. Together with Andrew Hippisley I’m one of the founding editors of the monograph series Edinburgh Studies in Theoretical Linguistics.

Research summary

My research interests are in theoretical linguistics and language change.

From September 2022 to August 2025, I shall be on long-term research leave working on a project funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, which is called ‘Simple grammars, relative clauses and language change’. This is a development of work I’ve previously done with Rob Truswell. The project starts from the question why Indo-European languages and their areal neighbours are so surprisingly more likely to have headed relative clauses built around interrogative pro-forms such as ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘which’ etc. (Wh-words), than any other language family or area, and the project explores research questions in typology, semantics, and language contact. These kinds of relative clause have recurred independently in several Indo-European languages in processes of ‘parallel evolution’, but that finding leaves open the questions of why parallel evolution happens and why these forms are also found in unrelated neighbour languages. Our joint work has been reported in a talk to the Philological Society, and other talks and publications, mostly on the history of English, including this article and chapter.

But first, I'm finishing up a book for CUP called ‘Networks of predication’. In this book, I argue that raising and control, structures with participial complements and small clauses all involve the same syntactic pattern of grammatical relations and structure sharing, with the main differences being in the semantics, including the argument linking patterns. From this, I develop a mostly semantic account of various diachronic changes, including certain patterns of auxiliation, which are consistent with grammatical change taking place in incremental small steps.

In my previous theoretical work, I’ve mainly focused on argument structure and event structure, and other questions in language change. My books The event structure of perception verbs (OUP 2010) and Ten lectures on event structure in a network theory of language (Brill 2020) are both about the lexical-semantic network structures of verb meanings and are also contributions to the linguistic theory, Word Grammar originally developed by Dick Hudson. The second book presents the material I gave in lectures at several universities in Beijing in 2016. The main theoretical claim in both books is that language is mentally represented as a typed radical network with atomic nodes; the various arguments and analyses of data that they present follow from that claim. Word Grammar is a dependency grammar; my most recent paper argues against mutual dependency. I’ve also written on sundry other topics such as Word Grammar morphology, thematic roles (with Jim Donaldson), the role of defaults in linguistics (with Andrew Hippisley), and wordhood.

In my other work on language change, I bring theoretical questions about the mental network together with the question of how mental grammars differ from speaker to speaker over time, giving rise to (and in response to) the language environment. In the network approach, directionality in grammatical change is not obviously conditioned by the nature of grammatical structures, so one of my ongoing questions is how we account for directionality in grammatical change given a radical network architecture. Along the way, for example, I’ve worked on constructional change; the development of the definite article in English; and the emergence of the Romance synthetic future.

I’ve co-edited a number of books: Defaults in morphological theory (OUP 2017, with Andrew Hippisley); Theory and data in cognitive linguistics (Benjamins 2014, with Willem Hollmann); The typology of Asian Englishes (Benjamins 2011, with Lisa Lim); and Constructional approaches to English grammar (Mouton de Gruyter 2008, with Graeme Trousdale).