Faculty

Steven Abney

abney@umich.edu
Office: 412 Lorch

Steve Abney is Associate Professor of Linguistics, EECS, and the School of Information. He specializes in computational linguistics and the topics he has worked on, or is currently working on, include parsing and human sentence processing, machine learning and language acquisition, stochastic models, corpora, documentation of endangered languages, information extraction, question answering, spoken dialogue systems, syntax, prosody, and semantics.

Marlyse Baptista

baptistm@umich.edu
Office: 462 Lorch

Marlyse Baptista, Associate Professor of Linguistics and CAAS, studies the morpho-syntax interface in pidgin and creole languages, combining corpus data with the use of theoretical, descriptive and technological tools. Her research explores the ways creole languages inform linguistic theory and to what extent linguistic theory, in turn, helps understand how creole grammatical systems operate. Her latest book Noun Phrases in Creole Languages, co-edited with Jacqueline Guéron (2007), investigates the syntax and semantics of noun phrases in 15 creoles while highlighting the interpretive variation and complexity of bare nouns. She also examines theories of language change, language creation and creole formation; she focuses on the precise identification of the cognitive processes involved in contact situations. The applied side to her work considers literacy issues and orthographic choices confronting the representation of creoles in Education, as in the case of Cape Verdean Creole.

William Baxter

wbaxter@umich.edu
Office: 407 Lorch

Bill Baxter, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Asian Languages and Cultures, specializes in historical linguistics. His book, A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology (Mouton DeGruyter, 1992), presents a reconstruction of the pronunciation of Old Chinese (the language of the earliest Chinese literary texts). His recent publications deal with the history of Chinese and its dialects, linguistic approaches to early Chinese literature, and the methodology of historical linguistics.

Patrice Speeter Beddor

beddor@umich.edu
Office: 408 Lorch

Pam Beddor is Professor and Chair of Linguistics. Her research areas include the acoustics of coarticulation, speech perception, and the relation between phonetics and phonology. She is particularly interested in the ways in which perception - especially perception of coarticulation - influences phonological systems, taking the view that better understanding of the perception-phonology relation is important to models of speech perception and phonological theory. A current series of cross-language experiments, supported by NSF, investigates the acoustics and perception of coarticulation as they pertain to certain widespread patterns of sound change.

Paula Berwanger

pberwang@umich.edu
Office: 421 Lorch

Paula Berwanger is a Lecturer III in Linguistics who specializes in American Sign Language and Deaf Culture. Her research interests are in the area of first language acquisition of American Sign Language by children with Deaf parents. She is presently examining the acquisition of ASL by hearing and deaf twins with Deaf parents.

Julie Boland

jeboland@umich.edu
Office: 414 Lorch

On leave 2006-2007

Julie Boland is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Psychology. One focus of Dr. Boland's current research is the lexical/syntactic interface. How is syntactic knowledge stored and accessed, and to what extent is syntactic knowledge stored in the lexicon and accessed via word recognition? Another focus is the syntactic/semantic interface. In the course of sentence comprehension, do we construct distinctly structural and distinctly conceptual representations of a sentence, and to what extent is the conceptual representation dependent upon determining a (single) syntactic structure?

Andries Coetzee

coetzee@umich.edu
Office: 419 Lorch

Office Hours: Tue Thu 12:00-2:30 or by appt, 419 Lorch Hall

Andries Coetzee is Assistant Professor of Linguistics. One focus of his research is on the formal/mathematical properties of Optimality Theory. This research focuses on the empirical results that can be gained from viewing an OT grammar as a mathematical object. Another aspect of his research deals with phonological variation. Generative theories of grammar are basically categorical in nature, and non-categorical phenomena such as variation therefore pose a challenge to generative grammar. Dr. Coetzee's research investigates possible responses of generative grammar to this challenge. A third focus of his research is on phonological processing: To what extent does phonological grammar contribute towards tasks such as lexical decision, well-formedness judgments, phoneme identification, etc.? Can grammar help us to understand the manner in which language users perform these tasks? What do tasks such as these tell us about the structure of grammar?

San Duanmu

duanmu@umich.edu
Office: 417 Lorch

On leave Fall 2006

San Duanmu is Professor of Linguistics. His research explores general phonological properties in human languages and the phonetic and biological basis of such properties. He has worked on features, tone, stress, syllable structure, the syntax-phonology interaction, and verse prosody. His current projects include a corpus study of English word stress, a corpus study of modern Chinese verse, and a book on syllable structure.

Steven Dworkin

dworkin@umich.edu
Office: 407 Lorch

On leave Fall 2006

Steve Dworkin is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, and Linguistics. He specializes in Romance and Hispanic diachronic linguistics, with emphasis on the evolution of the lexicon. His recent publications have dealt with internal structural factors which have led to changes (especially word loss) in the vocabulary of Medieval Spanish. He is currently studying the interface between semantic change, syntactic change and lexical loss. Professor Dworkin is also interested in issues of Spanish diachronic phonology and morphology (both inflectional and derivational), as well as the application to Spanish and Romance historical linguistics of recent insights on language change afforded by typology, grammaticalization and sociohistorical linguistics.

Samuel Epstein

sepstein@umich.edu
Office: 411 Lorch

Sam Epstein, Professor of Linguistics, has a special interest in developing a restrictive, explanatory theory of syntactic properties common to all human grammars. He is also interested in methodological issues confronting syntactic theory formation and more broadly has interests in generative, mentalist explanation. He has also conducted research regarding child first language acquisition, and adult second language acquisition.

Jeffrey Heath

jheath@umich.edu (for mail from umich.edu addresses only)
schweinehaxen@hotmail.com (for mail from external addresses)
Office: 418 Lorch

In Africa Jan-Aug 2008

Jeff Heath has done some eleven years of field research on Australian languages (1970's), Maghrebi Arabic (1980's), and since 1990 on languages of interior West Africa. He is currently involved in a project on Dogon languages using up-to-date technology. His special interests are morphology-centered (nonmodular) grammar, the incorporation of prosody (tone, accent, and intonation) into grammar, and cognitive anthropological linguistics (especially of the lexicon). He also teaches courses on advertising.

Deborah Keller-Cohen

dkc@umich.edu
Office: 409 Lorch

Office Hours: Th 2:00-4:00,

Deborah Keller-Cohen is Professor of Linguistics, Women's Studies and Education. Professor Keller-Cohen has conducted research on a wide range of areas using ethnographic, experimental, archival and textual methodologies. Her work on literacy has examined both contemporary and historical American contexts with a focus on everyday understandings of reading, writing and speaking. She has examined literate practices in a credit union, how people understand and use the phone bill and how colonial Americans conceived of literacy. As a discourse analyst, her work has explored how people tell their life stories with particular emphasis on individual and gender-related differences. Her newest line of work is concerned with language and aging with a focus on the oldest old, those over 85. In particular she is examining the relationship between the maintenance of language skills and the nature of one's social environment and how gender, education and cognition affect that relationship.

Ezra Keshet

ekeshet@umich.edu
Office: 453B Lorch

Ezra Keshet joins us as visiting Assistant Professor in 2008-09, holding the Language Learning visiting faculty position. Ezra completed his PhD in semantics at MIT, and his work touches on syntax, pragmatics and discourse. His dissertation argues that possible worlds and times must be explicitly represented in the syntax of natural language and explains several constraints such representations must obey. He has also done research on scalar implicature, showing that an analysis involving alternative semantics solves several puzzles relating to the topic; and telescoping, including arguments that syntactic rules sometimes bridge multiple sentences, given the proper discourse environment. Other interests of Ezra’s include singing, cooking, and computational linguistics.

Natalia Kondrashova

natakon@umich.edu
Office: 454 Lorch

Natalia Kondrashova is a Research Investigator/Lecturer in Linguistics and Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is interested in linguistic models and theories that relate the meaning (semantics) to the form (syntax or morphosyntax), investigating the principles and constraints that govern this relationship, and trying to understand the extent of crosslinguistic variation that natural languages allow and the mechanisms that can account for such variation in a specific language. Her research topics include interpretation of tenses, semantics and syntax of copular structures across languages, and effects of the word order on interpretation.

John M. Lawler

jlawler@umich.edu
Office: 466 Lorch

John Lawler is Associate Professor of Linguistics and the Residential College. He is a general practitioner of Linguistics, studying the processes of metaphor in relation to lexicon and grammar from a cognitive perspective. He is particularly curious about embodied metaphors, and those underlying mathematics, computing, and epistemology. In addition, he has a special interest in popular English grammar, and in extending the scope and quality of linguistic education in American culture. Within applied computational linguistics, his main interests are semantic problems of computer lexicography and user interface design, and his special focus in Indonesian linguistics is on Malay and Acehnese. He has a large and popular Web site at http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler.

Elaine McNulty

emcnulty@umich.edu
Office: 454 Lorch

Office hours: Tue 12:00-1:00,

Elaine McNulty is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Her teaching and research is focused on theoretical syntax, first language acquisition, and neurolinguistics. She is particularly interested in language acquisition by deaf and blind children and the implications of neurolinguistic data for cognitive/linguistic theory.

Carmel O'Shannessy

carmelos@umich.edu
Office: 450 Lorch

Carmel O'Shannessy is Assistant Professor of Linguistics. Her research interests include language contact phenomena, language variation and change, and child language acquisition. She is currently studying language shift and the emergence of a new bilingual mixed language in northern Australia, the result of processes of contact between an Australian language, Warlpiri, English and Kriol (an Australian creole).

Acrisio Pires

pires@umich.edu
Office: 458 Lorch

Acrisio Pires is Assistant Professor of Linguistics. His research focuses primarily on syntactic theory and comparative syntax, especially within Principles & Parameters and Minimalism. Among some questions that have guided his work are: What constitutes an appropriate theory of human linguistic knowledge, especially as applied to syntax and semantics? How can such a theory explain the apparent diversity of human languages? In addition, what contribution can comparative syntax and morphosyntax make to the development of scientific models of language? How can linguistic theory and models of language acquisition contribute to the explanation of how language change takes place?

Robin Queen

rqueen@umich.edu
Office: 406 Lorch

Robin Queen is Associate Professor of Linguistics and Germanic Languages and Literatures. Her teaching and research center on sociolinguistic questions related to language contact, language ideology, and language change. She has also considered questions concerning the ties between language and social identities. Her work draws on data from a wide-variety of sources, including Turkish-German bilinguals, American lesbians, daytime television dramas and American films dubbed into German.

Sarah Thomason

thomason@umich.edu
Office: 413 Lorch

Sally Thomason is the William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics and Acting Chair for the Department of Linguistics for 2007-2008.

Her research specialties include historical linguistics and language contact, with a focus on principles of contact-induced language change and contact language genesis (pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages). She also specializes in Montana Salish linguistics, and is working on a dictionary and text collection of that language. A research hobby rather than a serious speciality is debunking linguistic pseudoscience.