In 2022, he was elected a
Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[4]
Research
His 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.[3]
Selected publications
Willis, David. 1998. Syntactic change in Welsh: A study of the loss of verb-second. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ISBN9780198237594
Willis, David. 2000. On the distribution of resumptive pronouns and wh-trace in Welsh. Journal of Linguistics 36(3), 531–573.
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.
ISBN9789027255426
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.
ISBN9780199602537
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.
ISBN9780199602544