Kate Burridge


Kathryn "Kate" Burridge is a prominent Australian linguist specialising in the Germanic languages. Burridge currently occupies the Chair of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University.

Career

Burridge earned her PhD at the University College London in 1983 with a dissertation entitled, Some aspects of syntactic change in Germanic, with particular reference to Dutch.
Besides her research on Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking communities in Canada and grammatical change in Germanic languages, she has written influential works on the nature of euphemism and dysphemism, linguistic taboo, and on English grammatical structure in general.
Burridge is a regular presenter of language segments on ABC Radio. She appeared weekly as a panellist on ABC TV's Can We Help?, and has also appeared on The Einstein Factor.

Honors and distinctions

She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998 and Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2020.
She is a member of the editorial board of the Australian Journal of Linguistics.

Selected works

Monographs

  • "Euphemism and Dysphemism: Language Used as Shield and Weapon" – co-authored with Keith Allan.
  • "Diachronic Studies on the Languages of the Anabaptists" – co-edited with Werner Enninger.
  • "Syntactic Change in Germanic".
  • "Canada – Australia: Towards a Centenary of Partnership" – co-edited with Lois Foster and Gerry Turcotte.
  • "English in Australia and New Zealand – An Introduction to its Structure, History and Use" – co-authored with Jean Mulder.
  • "Introducing English Grammar" – co-authored with Kersti Börjars.
  • "Blooming English: Observations on the roots, cultivation and hybrids of the English Language".
  • "Weeds in the Garden of Words: further observations on the tangled history of the English language".
  • "Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language" – co-authored with Keith Allan.

    Book reviews