In 2017 he was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's Humanities medal.
[11] Bauer was brought up in Yorkshire, where his parents moved when he was six years old.
He attended King James's Grammar School and was then accepted at Edinburgh in 1967 to do a course in French language with general linguistics and phonetics.
He finished his PhD in 1975, presenting the thesis Nominal compounds in Danish, English and French,[12] and started teaching in the English Department at Odense University, Denmark.
[13] Bauer is a contributor to The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.