Rate My Professor William Salmon

William Salmon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Texas. He earned a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Yale University in 2009, with a dissertation titled Dislocations, Context, and Composition: or, Double Subjects in Brazilian Portuguese. He also holds an M.A. in linguistics and literature from the University of North Texas and a B.A. in Anthropology from Texas State University.

Salmon conducts research at the semantics-pragmatics interface, in sociolinguistics, and in language and law. His language interests center on Creole languages of the United States and the Caribbean as well as English varieties in the United States, including Southern vernacular Englishes and especially those spoken in Texas. At UNT he teaches courses in semantics and pragmatics, the history of English, and language and law. His publications include the books Tropical Tongues: Language Ideologies, Endangerment, and Minority Languages in Belize (2018, co-authored with Jennifer Gomez Menjivar) and Linguistics: Words, Rules, and Information (2013, co-authored with C. Park), along with numerous articles and chapters such as Negative Inversion, Social Meaning, and Gricean Implicature: A Study Across Three Texas Ethnolects (2020) and Social Markers and Dimensions of Meaning (2022). Salmon serves as Chair of the Department of Linguistics in the College of Information.