Naomi Baron

Last updated

Naomi S. Baron (born September 27, 1946, New York, NY) is a linguist and professor emerita of linguistics at the Department of World Languages and Cultures at American University in Washington, D.C. [1]

Contents

Education and career

Baron earned a B.A. in 1968 in English and American Literature at Brandeis University, and, in 1973, a PhD in linguistics at Stanford University. Her dissertation is titled, "The Evolution of English Periphrastic Causatives: Contributions to a general theory of linguistic variation and change." [2] She taught at Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design, Emory University, and Southwestern University before coming to American University, where she held a position from 1987 until her retirement.[ when? ]

Research interests

Her areas of research and interest include computer-mediated communication, writing and technology, language in social context, language acquisition and the history of English. She is also interested in language use in the computer age, instant messaging, text messaging, mobile phone practices, cross-cultural research on mobile phones, Human multitasking behavior, and Facebook online social interaction usage by American college students. [3] She has published a number of books on these topics.

Honors and awards

She was a Guggenheim Fellow, [4] Fulbright Fellow, and president of the Semiotic Society of America. [5]

Her book, Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, which was published in 2008, won the English-Speaking Union’s HRH The Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Award for 2008. [6] [7]

Selected works

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ferdinand de Saussure</span> Swiss linguist and philosopher (1857–1913)

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet slang</span> Slang languages used by different people on the Internet

Internet slang is a non-standard or unofficial form of language used by people on the Internet to communicate to one another. An example of Internet slang is "LOL" meaning "laugh out loud." Since Internet slang is constantly changing, it is difficult to provide a standardized definition. However, it can be understood to be any type of slang that Internet users have popularized, and in many cases, have coined. Such terms often originate with the purpose of saving keystrokes or to compensate for small character limits. Many people use the same abbreviations in texting, instant messaging, and social networking websites. Acronyms, keyboard symbols, and abbreviations are common types of Internet slang. New dialects of slang, such as leet or Lolspeak, develop as ingroup Internet memes rather than time savers. Many people also use Internet slang in face-to-face, real life communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julia Kristeva</span> Bulgarian philosopher (born 1941)

Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and novelist who has lived in France since the mid-1960s. She has taught at Columbia University, and is now a professor emerita at Université Paris Cité. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honor, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.

Semiotics is the systematic study of sign processes and the communication of meaning. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign's interpreter.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John C. Wells</span> British phonetician (born 1939)

John Christopher Wells is a British phonetician and Esperantist. Wells is a professor emeritus at University College London, where until his retirement in 2006 he held the departmental chair in phonetics. He is known for his work on the Esperanto language and his invention of the standard lexical sets and the X-SAMPA phonetic script system.

Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.

<i>Alphabet to E-mail</i> 2000 book by Dr. Naomi Baron

Alphabet to E-mail: How Written English Evolved and Where It's Heading (ISBN 0-415-18685-4) is a book by linguist Dr. Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, Washington, D.C. It was first published in 2000, published by Routledge Press.

Roy Harris was a British linguist. He was Professor of General Linguistics in the University of Oxford and Honorary Fellow of St Edmund Hall. He also held university teaching posts in Hong Kong, Boston and Paris and visiting fellowships at universities in South Africa and Australia, and at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet linguistics</span> Domain of linguistics

Internet linguistics is a domain of linguistics advocated by the English linguist David Crystal. It studies new language styles and forms that have arisen under the influence of the Internet and of other new media, such as Short Message Service (SMS) text messaging. Since the beginning of human–computer interaction (HCI) leading to computer-mediated communication (CMC) and Internet-mediated communication (IMC), experts, such as Gretchen McCulloch have acknowledged that linguistics has a contributing role in it, in terms of web interface and usability. Studying the emerging language on the Internet can help improve conceptual organization, translation and web usability. Such study aims to benefit both linguists and web users combined.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Karen Spärck Jones</span> British computer scientist (1935–2007)

Karen Ida Boalth Spärck Jones was a self-taught programmer and a pioneering British computer scientist responsible for the concept of inverse document frequency (IDF), a technology that underlies most modern search engines. She was an advocate for women in computer science, her slogan being, "Computing is too important to be left to men." In 2019, The New York Times published her belated obituary in its series Overlooked, calling her "a pioneer of computer science for work combining statistics and linguistics, and an advocate for women in the field." From 2008, to recognize her achievements in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP), the Karen Spärck Jones Award is awarded to a new recipient with outstanding research in one or both of her fields.

Sandra Annear Thompson is an American linguist specializing in discourse analysis, typology, and interactional linguistics. She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She has published numerous books, her research has appeared in many linguistics journals, and she serves on the editorial board of several prominent linguistics journals.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

Dennis Baron is a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research focuses on the technologies of communication; language legislation and linguistic rights; language reform; gender issues in language; language standards and minority languages and dialects; English usage; and the history and present state of the English language.

Elizabeth Closs Traugott is an American linguist and Professor Emerita of Linguistics and English, Stanford University. She is best known for her work on grammaticalization, subjectification, and constructionalization.

Irmengard Rauch is a linguist and semiotician.

Gillian Elizabeth Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist, and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Sankoff's notable former students include Miriam Meyerhoff.

Naomi Sager is an American computational linguistics research scientist. She is a former research professor at New York University, now retired. She is a pioneer in the development of natural language processing for computers.

April Mary Scott McMahon is a British academic administrator and linguist, who is Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Students at the University of Manchester.

Patsy M. Lightbown is an American applied linguist whose research focuses on the teaching and acquisition of second and/or foreign languages in a classroom context. Her theories of second language acquisition earned her the SPEAQ Award for "contributions which have had an impact on the entire English teaching community in Quebec". She served in the United States Peace Corps in Niger, West Africa from 1965 to 1967. In her more than forty years in the field she has taught at multiple universities across the United States, Australia and Canada. She holds the title of Distinguished Professor Emerita at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. She has written seven published books and has been featured in many book chapters and refereed journals. She currently works as an independent consultant, editor, researcher and writing in second language acquisition and learning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingrid Piller</span> Australian linguist (born 1967)

Ingrid Piller is an Australian linguist, who specializes in intercultural communication, language learning, multilingualism, and bilingual education. Piller is Distinguished Professor at Macquarie University and an elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Piller serves as Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Multilingua and as founding editor of the research dissemination site Language on the Move. She is a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts.

References

  1. "Naomi Baron - Prof Emerita". American University. Retrieved 2021-12-30.
  2. "Ph.D. Alumni | Linguistics". linguistics.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2021-12-30.
  3. "Always On: Joint Winner of the 2008 Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Award", Oxford University Press news, 2008.
  4. John Simon Gugenheim Foundation List of All Fellows https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/naomi-s-baron/
  5. "Who We Are – Semiotic Society of America". 10 May 2021. Retrieved 2021-12-30.
  6. "HRH The Duke of Edinburgh ESU English Language Book Award 2008", ESU, November 12, 2008
  7. "Awards Ceremony at Buckingham Palace", ESU, November 12, 2008.

Further reading