Dafydd Gibbon


Dafydd Gibbon is a British emeritus professor of English and General Linguistics at Bielefeld University in Germany, specialising in computational linguistics,
the lexicography of spoken languages,
applied phonetics and phonology. He is particularly concerned with endangered languages and has received awards from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Poland.
Gibbon is the author of over 180 publications, editor of three handbooks and three further collections, and supervisor of 21 PhD theses. He has been Visiting Professor at Jinan University, Guangzhou, China,
since 2016.

Early life and education

Dafydd Gibbon was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, UK.
He is the son of a Welsh Baptist clergyman, John Thomas Gibbon and Mary Gibbon, with whom he and his four siblings lived in different towns in England and Wales during their father's pastoral ministry.
He attended elementary school and grammar school in Huddersfield and grammar schools in Llanelli, South Wales, and in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk.
His grandparents were tenant farmers in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, and they and his father were native speakers of Welsh. As a child he experienced inter-generational language loss, being spoken to only in English, but retaining basic knowledge of Welsh thanks to Welsh lessons in school.
Gibbon studied German, French and theology at King's College, University of London.
He earned his B.A. Honours from the University of London and his Associate of King's College in 1966. He received his doctor of philosophy degree at the University of Göttingen in 1976, with a dissertation on Perspectives of intonation analysis.
Its discussion of "calling" or "vocative invocation" was considered "the most complete discussion of the subject to date".

Academic career

Gibbon started his academic career in the year 1968 as an English lecturer at the Seminar für Englische Philologie, University of Göttingen, Germany. Four years later he became an assistant professor at that university and held this position until 1980. In 1980–1981 he worked as professor for Theory and Practice of translation at University of Applied Sciences in Cologne. In 1981 he became professor of English and General Linguistics at the Faculty of Linguistics and Literary Studies at Bielefeld University in Germany, working there until his retirement in 2009.
Gibbon participated in the European Speech Assessment Methods project and was involved in development of the SAMPA Alphabet in this project, and in the European EAGLES projects. As part of these projects he was lead editor of two handbooks on standards and evaluation of speech technology systems.
In the international Verbmobil project for speech-to-speech translation, he was the lexicographic coordinator for the development of an inheritance lexicon, supporting speaker independent automatic translation from German to English and Japanese.
He became Convenor of the international COCOSDA group from 2006 until 2014.
He has published mainly in the areas of computational phonology, prosody, and lexicography. He has researched English, German, Welsh, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Yacouba, and Baule, Tem,
Igbo,
and Ibibio, Kuki-Thadou and Mandarin, and is particularly concerned about endangered languages.
On 10 March 2010, Gibbon was selected as Linguist of the Day on the Linguist List and then again on 27 March 2018 as Featured Linguist.
His Erdős number is 4, with the lineage Erdős – Tarski – Maddux – Ladkin – Gibbon, and his current h-index is 23.

Awards

Gibbon has received various awards including the following:

Books