Vyvyan Evans


Vyvyan Evans is a former Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex, Brighton University and Bangor University. He has published fourteen books on language, meaning and mind, including cognitive linguistics, and appears on radio and TV appearances discussing his research on Emoji.

Education and career

Evans received his PhD in linguistics from Georgetown University in 2000. His research relates to the nature of meaning, including the domains of space and time. He also works on lexical and compositional semantics, as well as figurative language, abstract thought, and digital communication, especially Emoji. His research has popularized the paralinguistic basis of emoji.
Evans is the architect of the theory of lexical concepts and cognitive models, also known as Access Semantics. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Language and Cognition, published by Cambridge University Press until 2018.
Evans' book "The Language Myth: Why language is not an instinct", written for a general audience, aims to refute Steven Pinker's 1994 "The Language Instinct" and the universal grammar of Noam Chomsky, claiming that a Kuhnian paradigm shift was under way in linguistics.

Books