John Mathieson Anderson, FBA (born 1941) is a British linguist and academic. He is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Edinburgh.[1] In the 1970s, Anderson revived the idea of localism, which is the linguistic theory that all grammatical cases, including syntactic cases, are based on a local meaning; however Anderson used a generative approach to the idea.[2] Collaborating with Colin J. Ewen, he wrote the first detailed overview of the theory of dependency phonology in their 1987 work Principles of Dependency Phonology.[3] -Wikipdia