Kate Burridge

Biography

Kate Burridge completed her undergraduate training in Linguistics and German at the University of Western Australia. This was followed by three years postgraduate study at the University of London. Kate completed her PhD in 1983 on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. She also taught at the Polytechnic of Central London before joining the Department of Linguistics at La Trobe University in 1984. In February, she moved to Monash University to take up the Chair of Linguistics.

Her main areas of research are: grammatical change in Germanic languages; the Pennsylvania German spoken by Amish/Mennonite communities in Canada; the notion of linguistic taboo; the structure and history of English. Kate is also a regular presenter of language segments on ABC Radio.