Courtesy Appointments in Linguistics

	Yahia Ahmad yahmad@umich.edu Office: 453C Lorch Dr. Ahmad will be visiting the Department of Linguistics at the Unviersity of Michigan for two years beginning Fall 2007 from Kuwait University's College of Arts.
	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 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.
	Benjamin Fortson (Ph.D., Harvard) Indo-European linguistics and comparative philology, historical linguistics, lexicography fortsonb@umich.edu Ben Fortson is Assistant 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.
	Hisa Kitahara kitaraha@umich.edu Office: 455A Lorch Dr. Kitahara will be visiting the Department of Linguistics at the Unviersity of Michigan for two years beginning Fall 2007 from Keio University, Japan.
	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.
	Richard Lewis (Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon) Computational modeling, psycholinguistics, sentence processing, cognitive architectures, unified theories of cognition rickl@umich.edu Rick Lewis is Associate 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.
	Dragomir Radev (Ph.D., Columbia) Information retrieval, natural language processing, text mining, biological information processing, web studies radev@umich.edu Drago Radev is Assistant 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).
	Marilyn Shatz (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) First language acquisition, discourse mshatz@umich.edu Marilyn Shatz is Professor of Psychology and Linguistics. Her research is guided by the questions of how children acquire the particular language of the speech community into which they are born and whether and how, in turn, the use of that language may influence cognitive processes. Thus, specific projects involve investigations into the relations between social, cognitive, and linguistic development. Current projects include studies of word learning and the early organization of the lexicon, cross-linguistic investigations of the development of understanding of mind, and cross-linguistic studies of the development of passive constructions and the influence of classifiers on categorization.
	Richmond Thomason (Ph.D., Yale) Semantics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, computational linguistics rthomaso@umich.edu 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.
	Thomas Toon (Ph.D., University of Michigan) Historical linguistics ttoon@umich.edu 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.