Rate My Professor Peter Peterson

Associate Professor Peter Peterson serves as an Honorary Associate Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Science (Linguistics) within the College of Human and Social Futures at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He earned his PhD from the University of Newcastle and a Master of Arts from Victoria University of Wellington. His academic career commenced as a Lecturer in the Department of English at Victoria University of Wellington from 1969 to 1981. Upon joining the University of Newcastle, he progressed through significant administrative roles, including Head of the Department of Linguistics from 1987 to 2001, Deputy Head of School and Convenor for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from 2002 to 2005, Chair of the Board of Studies in Speech Pathology from 1994 to 2002, BA Program Convenor in 2006, and Assistant Dean (Teaching and Learning) in the Faculty of Education and Arts from 2006. Peterson has contributed to program development, including the Bachelor of Speech Pathology, BSpth/BA, Graduate Diploma in Linguistics, and Master of Applied Linguistics. He has supervised the completion of ten PhD theses.

Peterson's research focuses on English syntax, with particular emphasis on complex sentence structures such as relative clauses, coordination, apposition, and associated phenomena, analyzed through the Lexical Functional Grammar framework. He established a theoretical account of coordination utilizing non-headed set analysis and alternatives to endocentric configurations. In Second Language Acquisition, his work examines the development of morphological and syntactic structures in learner English, underpinned by a large database of taped conversations with migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds, recognized as the largest such collection in Australia. This resource supports student projects, his research, and teaching. Key publications include contributions to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), such as 'Coordination and Supplementation' and 'Relative Constructions and Unbounded Dependencies'; the journal article 'Coordination: Consequences of a Lexical-Functional Account' in Natural Language & Linguistic Theory (2004); 'Commas and Connective Adverbs' (2009); 'Speaker's Choice: Number and Case "Agreement" in Coordination' (2007); and 'Non-Restrictive Relatives and Other Non-Syntagmatic Relations in a Lexical-Functional Framework' (2004). His teaching encompasses linguistics and children's literature.