John Newman holds the position of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics, University of Alberta and is currently an Adjunct Research Fellow at the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures & Linguistics, Monash University, Australia.

John’s research interests are quite broad and include cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, typology, and in an earlier life phonology (including a textbook on Feature Geometry). John has published on a diverse range of languages —Germanic, Sinitic (especially Chinese dialects), and Austronesian— and has carried out fieldwork in Sarawak in (Malaysia), Manus Island (in Papua New Guinea) and in Alberta, Canada.

For some years, John has been engaged in cross-linguistic research on verbal concepts, resulting in a number of book-length publications and journal articles on this topic. The names of some of the journals in which he has published speak to the diversity of his interests: Oceanic Linguistics, the Journal of Philippine Linguistics, the Journal of Chinese Linguistics, Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale, and the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science.

As members of the ICLA will know, John is the Editor-in-Chief of our journal Cognitive Linguistics, He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.