Ronald W. Langacker is Research Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor in the Department of Linguistics from 1966 to 2003. He is one of the pioneers and leading figures of Cognitive Linguistics and the creator of the Cognitive Grammar framework, which has shaped a considerable amount of research and has been applied to a wide range of linguistic phenomena in various languages and language families. He is one of the founders of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, served as its president from 1997 until 1999, and belongs to the editorial/advisory boards of numerous cognitive linguistics publications.

Ronald Langacker's primary research interest is the semantic and grammatical organization of language, but early in his career major efforts were devoted to describing and reconstructing the Uto-Aztecan family of Native American languages.

Some notable works are the seminal Foundations of Cognitive Grammar (1987 and 1991), Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar (1991), Grammar and Conceptualization (1999), and Cognitive Grammar: A Basic Introduction (2008).