Ramchand grew up in Jamaica and Trinidad and received her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1994, with a dissertation entitled, "Aspect and Argument Structure in Modern Scottish Gaelic."^[2] She subsequently spent 10 years working at the University of Oxford as a lecturer in general linguistics before moving to Tromsø in 2004, where she became full professor two years later in 2006.^[3][4]

Her widely cited research^[5] focuses on the syntax-semantics interface, especially argument structure.[1] She has worked on a variety of languages, including Scottish Gaelic, Bengali, and English.^[6]

Ramchand was Chairperson of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) from 2017-2022.^[7][6]

In 2018 Ramchand was elected to the Academy of Europe.^[8]

• Ramchand, Gillian. 1997. Aspect and predication: The semantics of argument structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780198236511
• Adger, David, and Ramchand, Gillian. 2005. Merge and Move: Wh-dependencies revisited. Linguistic Inquiry 36(2), 161–193.
• Ramchand, Gillian, and Reiss, Charles. 2007. The Oxford handbook of linguistic interfaces. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199247455
• Ramchand, Gillian. 2008. Verb meaning and the lexicon: A first phase syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521842402
• Ramchand, Gillian, and Svenonius, Peter. 2014. Deriving the functional hierarchy. Language Sciences 46, 152–174.
• Ramchand, Gillian. 2018. Situations and syntactic structures: Rethinking auxiliaries and order in English. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262535038