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Professors Emeriti


picture of Alton (Pete) Becker

Alton (Pete) Becker

(Ph.D., University of Michigan) Discourse Analysis

altonb@umich.edu

Pete Becker is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology. He is a specialist in Southeast Asian languages.


picture of Robbins Burling

Robbins Burling

(Ph.D., Harvard) Northeast India, Tibeto-Burman linguistics. Evolution of the capacity for language

rburling@umich.edu

Much of Robbins Burling's work centers on the linguistics and ethnology of tribal Northeast India and Bangladesh, and of related areas further east inS outheast Asia. He has worked since the 1950's (though with long interruptions) with the Garo people who are found in both NE India andin Bangladesh. He has written extensively about both the culture of these people and about their language. In addition he has a strong interest in the evolution of the human ability to learn a language.


picture of J. C. (Ian) Catford

J. C. (Ian) Catford

Phonetics, Caucasian languages.

catford@umich.edu

Ian Catford held the directorship of the English Language Institute and the Communication Sciences Laboratory. His research focusses on the phonetics of Caucasian languages. He is author of Fundamental Problems in Phonetics (Indiana University Press, 1977) and A Practical Introduction to Phonetics (Oxford Universtiy Press,1988). He was editor for the journal Translation and Chairman of the Board for the journal Language Learning.


picture of Alexander-Zeev Guiora

Alexander-Zeev Guiora

(Ph.D., University of Paris, Sorbonne) Psycholinguistics

aguiora@research.haifa.ac.il

Alexander-Zeev Guiora's research interests are in psycholinguistics, specifically the psychology of language behavior, a systematic inquiry into the relationship between developmental templates such as, empathy, language ego, gender identity, and time perception on the one hand and language behavior, such as pronunciation in second language and obligatory structures in native language on the other.


picture of John M. Lawler

John M. Lawler

(Ph.D., University of Michigan) Semantics, grammar, the English language, applied computational linguistics, Indonesian linguistics

jlawler@umich.edu

John Lawler 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.


picture of Lesley Milroy

Lesley Milroy

(Ph.D., Queens University, Belfast) Sociolinguistics, language ideology, conversation analysis, bilingualism, dialectology

amilroy@umich.edu

Lesley Milroy's interests in sociolinguistics extend across several subareas; bilingualism, language ideology and language standardization, variation theory, rural and urban dialectology. She has worked on phonological change and language attitudes in speech communities in Detroit, Michigan. She has attempted to develop sociohistorical accounts of language change and to that extent overlap with historical linguistics. Her work in Conversation Analysis deals with irregular data of various kinds, notably aphasic conversational data and mixed language data in bilingual communities.


picture of Joan Morley

Joan Morley

Applied linguistics

hjmorley@umich.edu


picture of Marilyn Shatz

Marilyn Shatz

(Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania) First language acquisition, discourse

mshatz@umich.edu

Marilyn Shatz is Professor Emeritus 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.


picture of Larry Selinker

Larry Selinker



picture of John Swales

John Swales

(Ph.D., Cambridge, UK) Discourse, second language acquisition

jmswales@umich.edu
Office: (ELI) 500 E. Washington St., Suite 1028

John Swales is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, and Co-Director of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) project. His principal research interest lies in written discourse, particularly academic and research writing. Associated interests involve genre theory, methods of discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes, and comparative rhetoric.