Professor Nigel Vincent

Organisation

Manchester University

Job title

Professor Emeritus

Biography

Nigel Vincent was chair of the Research Committee and Vice-President for Research and Higher Education Policy from 2010 to 2014. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Academy in 2006. His research interests lie in the modelling of grammatical change using feature-based approaches to morphology and syntax, especially within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar.

He is a former President of the Philological Society and of the International Society for Historical Linguistics. He has written numerous articles and chapters on the history and structure of Latin and the Romance languages, in particular on Italian and the dialects of Italy. He was co-director of the AHRC-funded project entitled Sintassi degli Antichi Volgari d’Italia (2000-5).

He is Professor Emeritus of General and Romance Linguistics at the University of Manchester having previously held the Mont Follick Chair of Comparative Philology until his retirement in 2011. He is also a member of the Academia Europaea. In 2013 he was elected to the Presidency of the Permanent International Committee of Linguists.

He completed his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Cambridge and has held lecturing posts at the Universities of London (Birkbeck College), Lancaster, Hull and Cambridge. He has been an Erskine Fellow at the University of Canterbury (NZ) and has held visiting posts at the Universities of Copenhagen, Pavia and Rome.

In RAE 2008 he was chair of Main Panel M, which included Modern Languages, Celtic Studies, Linguistics and English Language & Literature, and in 2009 was a member of HEFCE’s Expert Advisory Group on the Research Excellence Framework (REF).