R. L. Trask

R. L. Trask was born in western New York State in 1944. For some years he pursued a career in chemistry in the USA and in Turkey. In 1970 he came to England and switched to linguistics, obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of London in 1983. He taught linguistics at the University of Liverpool from 1979 to 1988, since when he has taught in the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences at the University of Sussex. His special interests are historical linguistics, grammar and the Basque language. He is the author of a number of books, including A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics, Language Change, Language: The Basics, A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology, Historical Linguistics, The History of Basque and The Penguin Guide to Punctuation.