Georgia M. Green

Last updated

Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary .

Contents

Academic career

Green earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1971. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1978-79. She is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was also a member of the Beckman Institute Cognitive Science Group. [1] [2]

Green has served as a peer reviewer or advisory editor for journals including Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Law and Social Inquiry, and Discourse Processes and publishers including Academic Press. [3] Since 1997 she has served on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary . [4]

Research

Green's research explores areas of pragmatics that show the effect of speaker intention on language interpretation, including word order effects of information structure, [5] discourse particles, and language applications to judicial contexts. [6] Her first book on meaning in language was respected for daring to use example sentences with real political topics. [7] Her book on natural language understanding was noted as admirably capturing the fact that “pragmatics is inherently interactive, that the central notions of the field... are properties of speakers and hearers, not of words or sentences.” [8]

Selected publications

Books

Articles and chapters

Related Research Articles

Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).

In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.

In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. Linguists who specialize in pragmatics are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA).

Robert D. Van Valin Jr. is an American linguist and the principal researcher behind the development of Role and Reference Grammar, a functional theory of grammar encompassing syntax, semantics, and discourse pragmatics. His 1997 book Syntax: structure, meaning and function is an attempt to provide a model for syntactic analysis which is just as relevant for languages like Dyirbal and Lakhota as it is for more commonly studied Indo-European languages.

Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a highly lexicalized, constraint-based grammar developed by Carl Pollard and Ivan Sag. It is a type of phrase structure grammar, as opposed to a dependency grammar, and it is the immediate successor to generalized phrase structure grammar. HPSG draws from other fields such as computer science and uses Ferdinand de Saussure's notion of the sign. It uses a uniform formalism and is organized in a modular way which makes it attractive for natural language processing.

Ivan Andrew Sag was an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He did research in areas of syntax and semantics as well as work in computational linguistics.

In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.

Construction grammar is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.

The term predicate is used in one of two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other views it as just the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake. By the second definition, the predicate of the same sentence is just the content verb likes, whereby Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. Differences between these two definitions can lead to confusion.

Generative semantics was a research program in theoretical linguistics which held that syntactic structures are computed on the basis of meanings rather than the other way around. Generative semantics developed out of transformational generative grammar in the mid-1960s, but stood in opposition to it. The period in which the two research programs coexisted was marked by intense and often personal clashes now known as the linguistics wars. Its proponents included Haj Ross, Paul Postal, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, who dubbed themselves "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Michaelis</span> American linguist

Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Glue semantics, or simply Glue, is a linguistic theory of semantic composition and the syntax–semantics interface which assumes that meaning composition is constrained by a set of instructions stated within a formal logic. These instructions, called meaning constructors, state how the meanings of the parts of a sentence can be combined to provide the meaning of the sentence.

In situation theory, situation semantics attempts to provide a solid theoretical foundation for reasoning about common-sense and real world situations, typically in the context of theoretical linguistics, theoretical philosophy, or applied natural language processing,

Donkey sentences are sentences that contain a pronoun with clear meaning but whose syntactical role in the sentence poses challenges to grammarians. Such sentences defy straightforward attempts to generate their formal language equivalents. The difficulty is with understanding how English speakers parse such sentences.

Annie Else Zaenen is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University, California, United States, and the main editor of the online journal Linguistic Issues in Language Technology.

Eloise Jelinek was an American linguist specializing in the study of syntax. Her 1981 doctoral dissertation at the University of Arizona was titled "On Defining Categories: AUX and PREDICATE in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic". She was a member of the faculty of the University of Arizona from 1981 to 1992.

Mary Dalrymple, FBA is a professor of syntax at Oxford University. At Oxford, she is a fellow of Linacre College. Prior to that she was a lecturer in linguistics at King's College London, a senior member of the research staff at the Palo Alto Research Center in the Natural Language Theory and Technology group and a computer scientist at SRI International. She received her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University in 1990. Her master's degree and bachelor's degree are from the University of Texas, Austin and Cornell College, respectively. She has also been associated with CSLI as a researcher.

Veneeta Dayal is an American linguist. She is currently the Dorothy R. Diebold Professor of Linguistics at Yale University.

Emily M. Bender is an American linguist who works on multilingual grammar engineering and technology for endangered language documentation. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of Washington. Her specialty lies in computational linguistics, which focuses on the techniques and computer science behind language speaking. With that she is also "an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering,... and director of Computational Linguistics Laboratory" at the University as well. Bender has a wide range of languages that she is fascinated with, which includes Japanese, Chintang, Mandarin, Wambaya, ASL and of course English. 

Anne Abeillé is a French linguist specialising in French grammar and syntactic theory, in particular constraint-based grammar, as well as natural language processing. She led the creation of the French Treebank, the first syntactically-annotated corpus of French.

References

  1. "Semantics Archive" . Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  2. "Conference Participants, Annotated Table of Contents, Problems Considered". Washington University Law Review. January 1995. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  3. Oh, Choon-Kyu and David A Dinneen (1979). Syntax and Semantics vol. 11: Presupposition.
  4. "Usage Panel". The American Heritage Dictionary. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  5. Woo, William F. "Just Write What Happened". Nieman Reports. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  6. Levi, Judith N. and Anne Graffam Walker (1990). Language in the Judicial Process. Plenum. pp. xii.
  7. "Making Linguistics Relevant". The Language Log. August 21, 2010. Retrieved July 12, 2015.
  8. Ward, Gregory (June 1991). "Review of Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding by Georgia M. Green". Language. 67 (2): 345–347. doi:10.1353/lan.1991.0050. S2CID   143043289.
  9. Kievit, Dirk (2003). "Review of: Practical guide to syntactic analysis, 2nd edition, by Georgia M. Green and Jerry L. Morgan". SIL Electronic Book Reviews. Retrieved 13 July 2015.
  10. Mueller-Lust, Rachel A. G. (1990). "Review: Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding by Georgia M. Green". The American Journal of Psychology. 103 (2): 281–284. doi:10.2307/1423148. JSTOR   1423148.
  11. Ward, Gregory L (1991). "Review: Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding by Georgia M. Green". Language. 67 (2): 345–347. doi:10.1353/lan.1991.0050. JSTOR   415112. S2CID   143043289.
  12. Wareham, H Todd (1998). "Book review: Linguistics and Computation". Natural Language Engineering. 4 (3): 277–286. doi:10.1017/S135132499721168X. S2CID   37149126.