Noel Burton-Roberts (born 22 April 1948) is a British linguist and Emeritus Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University.
He is known for work ranging over general and English linguistics: architecture of language, semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and English grammar.
With colleagues (notably the late Philip Carr), Burton-Roberts has developed ‘The Representational Hypothesis’, a view in which particular languages are seen as acquired morpho-phonological systems for the physical (speakable) representation of an innate universal syntactic language of thought.
His introductory textbook, Analysing Sentences (first published, 1986) on descriptive English grammar is used widely across the world.
He held the Chair of English Language & Linguistics from 1992 until his retirement in 2014.