Joan L. Bybee

Joan Bybee is Distinguished Professor Emerita, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico. Her research examines a range of areas in language—including phonology, morphology, grammar and semantics—focusing on understanding how and why languages change over time. In a cross-linguistic study of how tense, aspect and modality markers are created over time, she and her colleagues demonstrated that the same mechanisms of change are operative across all languages at all times. As a major proponent of Usage-Based Theory, she has demonstrated the importance of frequency and context of use on the emergence of linguistic structure. Bybee earned a doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles and taught for sixteen years at the University at Buffalo before moving to the University of New Mexico. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2004. In addition to work in linguistics, she runs a small cattle ranch and is active in the conservation ranching movement, having served as the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Quivira Coalition from 2008-2011.