Professor Emeritus of French and Linguistics
William J. Ashby was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1943. The first in his family to pursue higher education, Bill earned a B.A. in French from Alma College in 1965. He spent the 1963–64 academic year at the University of Aix-Marseilles, with the newly established Junior Year Abroad Program of the University of Michigan. He then enrolled in the graduate program of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Michigan, where he was awarded a four-year NDEA Fellowship. He first earned an M.A. in French literature (writing his thesis on Diderot), then a Ph.D. in Romance Linguistics.
Bill joined the faculty of the Department of French & Italian at UC Santa Barbara in 1971 as a beginning Assistant Professor. Except for a semester as a visiting professor at the Ecole normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud and at the Université de Toulouse—Le Mireil, he spent his entire professional career at UCSB.
Bill is considered a pioneer in French corpus linguistics. In 1976, he received an ACLS Fellowship, which allowed him to spend six months in Tours, where he recorded an extensive corpus of conversational French, which provided data for a series of studies tracing variation and change in the French language. He returned to Tours twenty years later and recorded a second corpus, which allowed him to confirm in real time some of the on-going linguistic changes he noted in the 1976 corpus.
Bill long served as North American editor of The Journal of French Language Studies, published by Cambridge University Press. At UCSB, he chaired the Department of French and Italian for eight years, during which time he was made a knight in the Order of Academic Palms by the French Ministry of Education. He long held an affiliated appointment in the Department of Linguistics, where he co-taught a course on Romance linguistics and served on numerous doctoral committees. He later served as the Provost of our College of Creative Studies (CCS) for twelve years (1993–2005), during which time enrollment tripled and the major in computer science was established.
A retrospective of Bill’s scholarly work, On Spoken French: an Ashby Reader (edited by Bonnie Fonseca-Greber) was published in 2023 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, SLCS 226).