Dr. John Beavers

Biography

John Beavers is a Robert D. King Centennial Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University in 2006, after obtaining an M.A. in Linguistics in 2002 and graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science and a B.A. in Mathematics and Linguistics from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. His research interests include syntax and semantics, with a primary focus on the nature of word meanings. He investigates how word meanings can be decomposed into basic semantic pieces and how these meanings influence grammatical usage in various languages, including English, Indonesian, Japanese, Spanish, Colloquial Sinhala, and Kinyarwanda. Beavers has co-authored the book "Roots of Verbal Meaning," which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020, and has contributed articles to leading journals in the field of linguistics, such as Language and Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. He has received several accolades for his teaching, including the Walter J. Gores Award at Stanford, and, in 2023, he became the inaugural Ivan Sag Fellow at the University of Rochester.

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