ashby@ucsb.edu
Phelps 5206
William J. Ashby, Professor Emeritus of French and of Linguistics, joined the faculty of UC Santa Barbara in 1971. Except for a semester as a visiting professor at the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, he spent his entire professional career at UCSB. His research focuses on variation and change in the French language, and he is considered a pioneer in French corpus linguistics. He long served as North American editor of The Journal of French Language Studies, published by Cambridge University Press. Professor Ashby chaired our Department of French and Italian for eight years, during which time he was made a knight in the Order of Academic Palms by the French Ministry of Education. He later served as the Provost of our College of Creative Studies for twelve years. A retrospective of his scholarly work, On Spoken French: an Ashby Reader (edited by Bonnie Fonseca-Greber) was published in 2023 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, SLCS 226).