Thomas Givon (born 22 June 1936), also known as Talmy Givón,[1][2][3] is an Israeli linguist and writer.
He is one of the founders of "West Coast Functionalism",[4] today classified as a usage-based model of language, and of the linguistics department at the University of Oregon.
Givón earned his bachelor of science degree cum laude in agriculture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1959.
Givón's last general linguistic project was The Genesis of Complex Syntax: Diachrony, Ontogeny, Cognition, Evolution.
Givón is said to have coined the aphorism that "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax",[2][3] in a development of Antoine Meillet's work on grammaticalisation.