[2] He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966 to 1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas.

Ross is known for naming concepts; he has coined many new terms describing syntactic phenomena, including copula switch, gapping, heavy NP shift, myopia, the penthouse principle, pied piping, scrambling, siamese sentences, sluicing, slifting, and sloppy identity.

In linguistics more generally, Ross popularized the use of the term squib to refer to a short scholarly article.

Ross was a student of Bernard Bloch, Samuel Martin and Rulon Wells at Yale University; Zellig Harris, Henry Hiz, Henry Hoenigswald and Franklin Southworth at the University of Pennsylvania; and Roman Jakobson, Noam Chomsky, Morris Halle, Paul Postal, Edward Klima and Hu Matthews at MIT.

Until Spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas and his class offerings there included Linguistics and Literature, Syntax, Field Methods, History of English, Semantics and Pragmatics.