John Robert "Haj" Ross (born May 7, 1938) is an American poet and linguist. He played a part in the development of generative semantics (as opposed to ) along with George Lakoff, James D. McCawley, and Paul Postal.[[[Wikipedia:Citing_sources|page needed]]]_2-0" class="reference"> He was a professor of linguistics at MIT from 1966–1985 and has worked in Brazil, Singapore and British Columbia, and until spring 2021, he taught at the University of North Texas. Ross's 1967 MIT dissertation is a landmark in syntactic theory and documents in great detail Ross's discovery of extraction islands.