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Courtesy Appointments in Linguistics


picture of Anne Curzan

Anne Curzan

(Ph.D., University of Michigan) History of English, language and gender, corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics, lexicography, pedagogy, composition and rhetoric, Old and Middle English language and literature

acurzan@umich.edu
Office: (English) 3187 Angell Hall

Professor Anne Curzan is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. She also has a faculty appointment in the School of Education. Professor Curzan's research interests include the history of English, language and gender, corpus linguistics, medieval language and literature, historical sociolinguistics, pedagogy, and lexicography. In addition to her teaching, research, and administrative posts in the English Department, Professor Curzan is co-editor of the Journal of English Linguistics. She and her co-author Lisa Damour also run T.A. training workshops around the country.


picture of Madhav Deshpande

Madhav Deshpande

(Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) Historical linguistics, Sanskrit grammatical tradition, Sanskrit phonetics, Indo-Aryan linguistics, sociolinguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit languages

mmdesh@umich.edu
Office: (ALC) 202 S. Thayer, Suite 6111

Madhav Deshpande is Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures, and Linguistics. During his undergraduate and graduate education, Madhav Deshpande began his linguistic training with the tradition of Sanskrit grammarians and subsequently incorporated modern linguistics within his academic background. His work extensively deals with phonetic, phonological, and syntactic theories of the Sanskrit grammarians like Panini, a historical understanding of how and why the traditions of linguistic analysis such as phonetics, etymology, grammar, and metrics developed in ancient India, as well as a historical sociolinguistics of Sanskrit and Prakrit languages that takes into account social, religious, and political history of the Indian subcontinent.


picture of Nick Ellis

Nick Ellis

(Ph.D., University of Wales) Cognition & perception, developmental psychology

ncellis@umich.edu
Office: (ELI) 500 E. Washington St., Rm. 1011

Nick Ellis is Professor of Psychology and Research Scientist in the English Language Institute. His research interests include psycholinguistic, cognitive scientific, applied linguistic, corpus linguistic, emergentist and behavioral genetic approaches to second and foreign language acquisition. Current foci include: usage-based acquisition, the probabilistic tuning of the language system and its computational modeling; the different roles of explicit and implicit language learning and knowledge and the nature of their interface; vocabulary, collocation, and formulaic knowledge; construction grammar and cognitive linguistics; language and brain; learned attention and blocking in language acquisition; the advanced language learner; behavioral genetics of SLA; and the applications of psychological theory in language testing and language instruction.


picture of Benjamin Fortson

Benjamin Fortson

(Ph.D., Harvard) Indo-European linguistics and comparative philology, historical linguistics, lexicography

fortsonb@umich.edu
Office: (Classical Studies) 2160 Angell Hall

Ben Fortson is Associate Professor of Greek and Latin (Department of Classical Studies) and Linguistics. He specializes in the comparative linguistic study of the Indo-European language family, focusing primarily on the Italic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, and Germanic branches, with side interests in comparative Indo-European metrics, poetics, and culture. He also does research in the methodology of historical linguistics and the mechanisms of phonological and morphological change. For several years he was etymologist and Senior Lexicographer of The American Heritage Dictionary of English, and continues to do occasional lexicographic work.


picture of Diane Larsen-Freeman

Diane Larsen-Freeman

(Ph.D., University of Michigan) Applied linguistics, second language acquisition, pedagogical grammar,conceptions of practice in language instruction.

dianelf@umich.edu

Diane Larsen-Freeman is Professor of Education and Linguistics, and Director of the English Language Institute. In her research, she brings a functional grammar perspective to bear on the way people mobilize their grammatical resources in order to make meaning, to maintain the flow of information, to manage interpersonal relationships, and to position themselves socio-politically, among other things. Her most recent work draws on complexity theory to explore the dynamic and nonlinear nature of language and its acquisition. Dr. Larsen-Freeman has also been investigating ways of overcoming the inert knowledge problem in language instruction.


picture of Richard Lewis

Richard Lewis

(Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon) Computational modeling, psycholinguistics, sentence processing, cognitive architectures, unified theories of cognition

rickl@umich.edu
Office: (Psychology) 4428F East Hall

Rick Lewis is Professor of Psychology, Computer Science, and Linguistics. His research investigates the computational foundations of human cognition and language, particularly focusing on aspects of language comprehension that help reveal the fixed structure of sentence processing architecture. The approach starts with functional computational models and brings to bear independent constraints from psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, theoretical linguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. Professor Lewis has several empirical and modeling projects underway that are mostly directed toward building a cross-linguistic theory of human sentence processing.


picture of Barbra Meek

Barbra A. Meek

(Ph.D., University of Arizona)

bameek@umich.edu
Office: (Anthropology) 230-C West Hall

Barbra Meek is Associate Professor of Anthropology. Her interests include child language socialization and acquisition, endangered and/or dormant language issues, linguistic theory and Athabaskan linguistics.


picture of Dragomir Radev

Dragomir Radev

(Ph.D., Columbia) Information retrieval, natural language processing, text mining, biological information processing, web studies

radev@umich.edu
Office: (School of Information) 3080 West Hall

Drago Radev is Professor of Information, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Linguistics, and leads the CLAIR (Computational Linguistics And Information Retrieval) group. Before joining Michigan, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. He is the author of more than 45 papers on information retrieval, text summarization, graph models of the Web, question answering, machine translation, text generation, and information extraction. His current research on probabilistic and link-based methods for exploiting very large textual repositories, representing and acquiring knowledge of genome regulation, and semantic entity and relation extraction from Web-scale text document collections is supported by NSF and NIH. Professor Radev serves on the HLT-NAACL advisory committee, was recently reelected as treasurer of NAACL, is a member of the editorial boards of JAIR and Information Retrieval, and is a four-time finalist at the ACM international programming finals (as contestant in 1993 and as coach in 1995-1997). He received a graduate teaching award at Columbia and recently, the UM award for Outstanding Research Mentorship (UROP).


picture of Richmond Thomason

Richmond Thomason

(Ph.D., Yale) Semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, computational linguistics

rthomaso@umich.edu
Office: (Philosophy) 2215 Angell Hall

Rich Thomason is Professor of Philosophy, Computer Science, and Linguistics. He is interested in applications of logic to a variety of problems in language, representation, and reasoning. He is currently working on uses of nonmonotonic logic in linguistics, the formalization of contextual reasoning, foundations of planning and practical reasoning, qualitative decision theory, and the formalization of interpretation and generation in discourse. He was editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic for many years, and is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.


picture of Thomas Toon

Thomas Toon

(Ph.D., University of Michigan) Historical linguistics

ttoon@umich.edu
Office: (English) 3228 Angell Hall

Tom Toon, Associate Professor of English and Linguistics, specializes in language variation and socio-historical linguistics, especially the influences of literacy on processes of language change. His associated research areas include Old Germanic languages and dialects, and early English paleography and manuscript studies.