Johan van der Auwera - Biography#

Johan van der Auwera is professor of General and English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp. He was educated as a linguist (MA 1975 , PhD 1980, habilitation/HDR 1990) and philosopher (Candidate 1975). His student and postdoc days were spent in Antwerp, Berkeley, Stockholm, Hannover and Nijmegen and visiting appointments took him to Paris, Princeton, Gothenburg, Hong Kong, Kyoto and Bangkok. Three major phases can be distinguished in his academic career. As a doctoral candidate in the late 1970s, he was primarily interested in sentence semantics and pragmatics. In his postdoctoral research in the 1980s, he joined the growing community of European typologists. From the 1990s onwards, he synthesized his semantic and typological work, combining the study of semantics and pragmatics with comparative linguistics, at an areal, genealogical and general typological level. Current research focuses on grammatical semantics and typology (including areal typology and dialectology), with special reference to mood, modality, negation, indefinites and impersonals.

He is the editor in chief of Linguistics and is on the board of several journals and book series. He has published 5 single authored volumes and 1 multi-authored one, ca. 220 journal articles or contributions to edited volumes, the majority of which peer reviewed, about half of them single-authored. He has (co-)edited 13 books and 9 theme issues of journals or working papers. The large majority of the output is in English, but he has also published original work in Dutch, French, German and Serbo-Croatian. He has given ca. 100 guest lectures and has presented ca. 230 conference talks, progressively more often invited/plenary. He has served and chaired in various national and international research evaluation committees.