Some downloadable papers and chapters
- Downloadable papers on Word Grammar
- Papers on education and other topics
- A semi-complete bibliography of my writings (up to 2016).
On linguistics (especially Word Grammar)
- 2025
- The syntactic constraint on English auxiliary contraction (forthcoming in Journal of Linguistics; with Nikolas Gisborne, Thomas Hikaru Clark, Eva Eppler, Willem Hollmann, And Rosta and Graeme Trousdale)
- Word Grammar for the Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics 2nd edition
- 2024
- Function words in Word Grammar (Linguistic Analysis 43. 513–548.)
- Welcome to a lifetime of fun! (Hudson, Richard. 2025. Welcome to a lifetime of fun! In Eldin Milak & Ana Tankosić (eds.), Becoming a Linguist. Advice from Key Thinkers in Language Studies, Chapter 5. Routledge.)
- 2021
- Word Grammar (for the Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics)
- 2020
- Review of the Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics (Hudson, Richard. 2020. Review of Thompson, Bowcher, Fontaine & Schönthal (2019): The Cambridge handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Functions of Language. https://doi.org/10.1075/fol.00030.hud.)
- 2019
- 2018
- 2017
-
Structural priming supports grammatical networks Comment on Branigan and Pickering: An experimental approach to linguistic representation. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40. e295. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17000437.
- Dependency, corpora and cognition (first draft of book chapter)
- Pied-piping in cognition. (Journal of Linguistics, 1-54. doi:10.1017/S0022226717000056)
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- 2016
- Comments on Sydney Lamb: Language Structure: A plausible theory (in Language Under Discussion)
- (morphology in) Dependency Grammar (2016, in Cambridge Handbook of Morphology)
- 2015
- 2014
- Cognitive functionalism in language education (2014)
- Review of Rolf Kreyer, The Nature of Rules, Regularities and Units in Language. A network model of the language system and of language use (2014) (submitted Nov 2014)
- The view from linguistics: Comment on “Approaching human language with complex networks” by Cong and Liu (Physics of Life Reviews 2014)
- Interview about morphology (draft 2014.6)
- 2013
- Dependency structure and cognition (2013)
- Dependency grammar (and syntactic government) (2013)
- Pied-piping in Word Grammar (2013)
- A cognitive analysis of John’s hat (pub Feb 2013)
- 2012
- 2010
- Review of Anat Ninio, “Language and the Learning Curve. A new theory of syntactic development” (Language 86, 452-5, 2010)
- BBS commentary on Doug Jones, “Human kinship, from conceptual structure to grammar” (2010)
- 2009
- Comment on Evans and Levinson (2009), “The myth of language universals”.
- Comment on Edmondson’s ‘General Cognitive Principles: The Structure of Behaviour and The Sequential Imperative’ (draft 2009)
- (with Haitao LIU and Zhiwei FENG) Using a Chinese treebank to measure dependency distance (pub 2009)
- 2008
- Lexical semantics and syntax: commercial transactions re-analyzed (draft June 2008)
- Word Grammar, for the Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis (draft April 2008)
- Word Grammar and Construction Grammar (published 2008)
- Word Grammar, cognitive linguistics and second-language learning and teaching (published 2008)
- 2007
- Word Grammar – for the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (published 2007)
- Towards a useful theory of language (Nov 2007)
- (with Amela Camdzic) Serbo-Croat-Bosnian Clitics and Word Grammar (published November 2007)
- Commercial transactions revisited (August 2007)
- Inherent variability and modularity: comments on Adger’s ‘Combinatorial variability (February 2007)
- English dialect syntax in Word Grammar (February 2007)
- 2006
- Wanna revisited (April 2006)
- 2005
- (with Jasper Holmes) Constructions in Word Grammar (published 2005)
- Introduction: What is Word Grammar? (in Kensei Sugayama and Richard Hudson. 2005. Word Grammar. New Perspectives on a Theory of Language Structure, Continuum, pp. 1-32)
- 2004
- Interpreting in linguistics (August 2004)
- Word Grammar for Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition) (April 2004)
- 2003
- Are determiners heads? (August 2003)
- Mismatches in default inheritance (2003)
- The psychological reality of dependencies (May 2003)
- Gerunds without phrase structure (published 2003 in LLLT)
- 2002
- Introduction to Word Grammar (July 2002)
- (with Chet Creider) Case Agreement in Ancient Greek: implications for a theory of covert elements (June 2002)
- Trouble on the left periphery (June 2002)
- Case agreement, PRO and structure sharing (May 2002)
- Mismatches in default inheritance (March 2002)
- Buying and selling in Word Grammar (January 2002)
- 2001
- Clitics in Word Grammar (August 2001)
- 2000
- Word Grammar – for International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (October 2000)
- Quantifiers in Word Grammar (August 2000)
- 1999
- Discontinuity (September 1999)
- I amn’t(July 1999)
- Subject-verb agreement in English (May 1999)
- (with Jasper Holmes) Re-cycling in the encyclopedia (May 99)
- Grammar without functional categories (August 99)
- What is a word? (unpublished)
- 1998
- Language as a cognitive network (September 1998)
- (with Chet Creider) Inflectional morphology in Word Grammar (Feb 1998, revised May 1998)
- 1997
- German partial VP fronting (August 1997)
- Word Grammar for Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (updated 1997)
- The rise of auxiliary DO: verb-non-raising or category-strengthening? (published 1997)
- Inherent variability and linguistic theory (published 1997)
- 1996
- The difficulty of (so-called) self-embedded structures (semi-published 1996)
- (with And Rosta, Jasper Holmes andNik Gisborne) Synonyms and syntax (published 1996)
- Towards a nation of linguists (unpublished)
- 1995
- Does English really have case? (published 1995)
- Competence without Comp (published 1995)
- Syntax and sociolinguistics (published 1995)
- HPSG without PS (unpublished)
- Measuring syntactic difficulty (unpublished)
- 1994
- About 37% of word-tokens are nouns (published 1994)
- Discontinuous phrases in dependency structure (UCL WPL 1994)
- 1992
- On so-called double-object constructions (Language 68 1992, 251-276)
-
Raising in syntax, semantics and cognition (In Iggy Roca (ed.), Thematic Structure: Its Role in Grammar., 175–198)
- 1989
- Gapping and grammatical relations (Journal of Linguistics 1989 25:57-94)
- English passives, grammatical relations and default inheritance (Lingua 1989)
- 1988
- The linguistic foundations for lexical research and dictionary design. (Int Jnl of Lexicography 1988 1:287-312)
- 1987
- Zwicky on heads (published 1987)
- 1986
- Sociolinguistics and the theory of grammar (published 1986)
- Review of two books on Systemic Grammar (published 1986)
- 1985
- Some basic assumptions about linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge (published 1985)
- The limits of subcategorization (published 1985)
- Review of George Horn, ‘Lexical Functional Grammar’ (published 1985)
- 1982
- Incomplete conjuncts (published 1982)
- 1981
- 1980
- 1976
- Hudson 1976 Lexical insertion in a transformational grammar (Foundations of Language 1976:89-107)
- Conjunction-reduction, gapping and right-node raising. (Language 1976 52:535-562)
- 1975
- The meaning of questions (published 1975)
- 1974
- 1973
- Syllables, moras and accents in Beja (published 1973)
- 1967
- Constituency in a systemic description of the English clause (published 1967)
- 1966
- Grammar without transformations (published 1966)
Papers on education and other topics
- 2026
- 2024
- A general paper for the Curriculum and Assessment Review
- Language at school: literature or linguistics?
- Commissioned for the Journal of the British Academy.
- 2023
- 2022
- (With Wilhem Hollmann) Is there really too much grammar teaching?
- (With Shahan Choudhury) Five reasons why grammar is important. (Choudhury, Shahan & Richard Hudson. 2022. Five reasons why grammar is important. NATE Primary Matters 42–45.)
- 2021
- 2020
- Computational measures of linguistic maturity.
- Grammar in English schools: a century of decline and rebirth
- Linguistics as education (for U-Lingua Magazine)
- Linguistics in Schools: the English past, present and future.
- Trust, expertise and policy-making in pandemic times: a view from linguistics
- Mathematics in language
- Comment on “The policy and policing of language in schools” by Ian Cushing.
- 2019
- 2018
- (with Neil Sheldon) Analysing the languages of the stars (for Babel Magazine)
- 2017
- Should schools teach grammar? (for 5-Minute Linguist)
- 2016
- 2015
- An interview for the magazine of the Independent Schools Modern Languages Association.
- 2014
- 2013
- (with Louis Blois) Language as Headache: puzzles, problems and the Linguistics Olympiad. (published 2013)
- (with Neil Sheldon) Linguistics at School: The UK Linguistics Olympiad (published in Language and Linguistics Compass 7:91-103, 2013)
- 2012
- (with Charles Alderson) The metalinguistic knowledge of undergraduate students of English Language or Linguistics (published 2012)
- Becoming a grammar teacher: Why? What? How? (draft, July 2012)
- 2011
- Where is language in higher education? (draft 2011, unpublished)
- (with Louis Blois) The Linguistics Olympiad (published Nov 2011 in e-magazine)
- (with Vivienne Rogers) Going for gold with languages. (In Francophonie Sept 2011, published by the Association for Language Learning)
- How many languages is it possible to learn? (for Rick Rickerson and Barry Hilton (eds) The Five-minute Linguist (2nd edition) (Equinox) (draft 2011)
- Why Yoda can’t be human (for e-magazine 2011)
- 2010
- (with Dan Clayton) Give us a golden age of grammar (TES Nov 5 2010) – supporting material
- Analysing the grammar of spoken language (August 2010 for e-magazine)
- Sweet’s New English Grammar (THE, July 2010)
- Is English a language? A brief history (June 2010)
- 2009
- Letter to THE about the Worton Report (13 Nov 2009)
- Norm, standard, deviation (draft July 2009)
- Words and pictures – graphical grammar (pub 2009 in e-magazine)
- How I became a linguist (Feb 2009, for Linguist List)
- A history of the LAGB: the first fifty years (published 2009)
- 2008
- The language crisis: HE to the rescue! (draft March 2008)
- Modification (e-magazine, 2008)
- Linguistic theory (for the Handbook of Educational Linguistics) (published 2008)
- Word Grammar, cognitive linguistics and second-language learning and teaching (published 2008)
- 2007
- Is standard English easy to learn? (October 2007)
- Measuring maturity (September 2007)
- How linguistics has influenced schools in England (March 2007)
- Language for its own sake. Towards an A level in linguistics for NATE magazine (pub Feb 2007)
- Grammatical functions (February 2007)
- Why are foreign languages in trouble? (Jan 2007)
- 2006
- Negative evidence (Nov 2006, for Teachit)
- Review of Evans and Green, ‘Cognitive Linguistics. An introduction’ for THES (Oct 2006)
- Word classes (January 2006)
- 2005
- Grammar and writing (July 2005)
- (with John Walmsley) The English Patient: English grammar and teaching in the twentieth century (May 2005)
- 2004
- Language education: grammar, for the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (April 2004)
- Grammar for writing (April 2004)
- 2002-4
- (With Geoff Barton) Weekly columns on grammar teaching (9 terms from April 2002 – 2004)
- 2003
- Why education needs linguistics (and vice versa) (July 2003)
- How can key skills “sell” linguistics to students and employers? (June 2003)
- Language is part of the network of knowledge (for American Assn for Applied Ling March 2003)
- Revolution in England: at last, linguistics meets school teaching (draft January 2003, unpublished)
- 2002
- The language of names (published, December 2002)
- Autobiography (June 2002)
- (With Geoff Barton) Grammar teaching: glamour or grind? (February 2002)
- 2001
- Grammar teaching and writing skills: the research evidence (published 2001)
- How to: Ensure a modifier does not dangle (March 2001)
- 1999
- Review of Terrence Deacon, “The Symbolic Species” (August 1999)
- 1998
- Grammar teaching is dead – NOT! (February 1998, revised May 1998)
- Is grammar teachable? (Spring 1998)
- 1995
- Children’s use of spoken standard English (1995)
- Practical syntax (unpublished)
- 1994
- 1984
- 1983
- Linguistic equality (1983)
- 1981