Lynne Murphy


Lynne Murphy is a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex. She runs the blog Separated by a Common Language under the username Lynneguist, and has written five books. She received a grant from the NEH Public Scholars Program for her most recent book, The Prodigal Tongue.

Studies

Murphy has a B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as an A.M. and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

Career

Murphy taught at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and Baylor University in Texas. In 2000, she moved to England and began teaching at the University of Sussex where she became a professor.
She has written 5 books: Semantic Relations and the Lexicon, Key Terms in Semantics, Lexical Meaning, Antonyms in English, and The Prodigal Tongue.
Her book The Prodigal Tongue, and her blog Separated by a Common Language, compare American English and British English.
In 2012, she gave a TEDx talk at the University of Sussex,, and in 2019 spoke at the Boring Conference.

Selected publications

Books