David Michael Benjamin Denison FBA (born 6 September 1950)[1] is a British linguist whose work focuses on the history of the English language.
He was educated at Highgate School[citation needed] and St John's College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and then Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic,[2] completing the latter tripos with an upper second-class degree in 1973.
[3] He earned his doctorate at Lincoln College, Oxford on "Aspects of the History of English Group-Verbs, with Particular Attention to the Syntax of the Ormulum".
[2][4] He was Smith Professor of English Language & Medieval Literature at the University of Manchester from 2008.
[5] Denison served from 1995 to 2010 as one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics.