Lisa Green (linguist)

Last updated
Lisa Green
Education
Scientific career
InstitutionsUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst
Thesis Topics in African American English: The verb system analysis  (1993)
Website people.umass.edu/lisag

Dr. Lisa Green is a linguist specializing in syntax and African American English (AAE). She is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. [1] In July 2020 she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor. [2]

Contents

Education

Before beginning her graduate studies in linguistics, Green received a B.S. in English education at Grambling State University and then an M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky. [3] Green then went on to receive a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1993. [4]

Career and research

After completing her Ph.D., Green spent 11 years at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Linguistics, [5] before going on to take up a position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. [5] There she founded and directs the Center for the Study of African American Language, [6] a resource for students and educators dedicated to dialect and language-related issues. An enduring goal of Green's is to dispel notions of AAE as a substandard linguistic variety by demonstrating its systematic nature.

Green's work has focused on linguistic variation between different dialects of English, with a primary focus on African American English. Her research focuses on morphosyntactic systems in African American English like tense and aspect marking and negation, [7] as well as first language acquisition of AAE by child speakers. [8]

Honors and awards

Green was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2016. [9]

Selected publications

Books

Selected papers

Related Research Articles

In linguistics, aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how an action, event, or state, as denoted by a verb, extends over time. Perfective aspect is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event. Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or repetitively as time flows.

An auxiliary verb is a verb that adds functional or grammatical meaning to the clause in which it occurs, so as to express tense, aspect, modality, voice, emphasis, etc. Auxiliary verbs usually accompany an infinitive verb or a participle, which respectively provide the main semantic content of the clause. An example is the verb have in the sentence I have finished my lunch. Here, the auxiliary have helps to express the perfect aspect along with the participle, finished. Some sentences contain a chain of two or more auxiliary verbs. Auxiliary verbs are also called helping verbs, helper verbs, or (verbal) auxiliaries. Research has been conducted into split inflection in auxiliary verbs.

African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada; most commonly, it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties, African-American English shows variation stylistically, generationally, geographically, in rural versus urban characteristics, in vernacular versus standard registers, etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken, particularly in urban communities, by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical, vocabulary, and accent features, AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However, in formal speaking contexts, speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary, usually while retaining elements of the nonstandard accent. Despite being widespread throughout the United States, AAVE is not the native dialect of all African Americans, and not all speakers are African American.

The term predicate is used in 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 defines it as only 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, while by the second definition, it is only the content verb likes, and Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. The conflict between these two definitions can lead to confusion.

Bernard Sterling Comrie, is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology, linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Partee</span> American linguist

Barbara Hall Partee is a Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass).

Emmon Bach was an American linguist. He was Professor Emeritus at the Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Professorial Research Associate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), part of the University of London. He was born in Kumamoto, Japan.

The generative approach to second language (L2) acquisition (SLA) is a cognitive based theory of SLA that applies theoretical insights developed from within generative linguistics to investigate how second languages and dialects are acquired and lost by individuals learning naturalistically or with formal instruction in foreign, second language and lingua franca settings. Central to generative linguistics is the concept of Universal Grammar (UG), a part of an innate, biologically endowed language faculty which refers to knowledge alleged to be common to all human languages. UG includes both invariant principles as well as parameters that allow for variation which place limitations on the form and operations of grammar. Subsequently, research within the Generative Second-Language Acquisition (GenSLA) tradition describes and explains SLA by probing the interplay between Universal Grammar, knowledge of one's native language and input from the target language. Research is conducted in syntax, phonology, morphology, phonetics, semantics, and has some relevant applications to pragmatics.

<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.

Habitual be, also called invariant be, is the use of an uninflected be in African-American English (AAE), Caribbean English and certain dialects of Hiberno-English to mark habitual or extended actions in place of the Standard English inflected forms of be, such as is and are. In AAE, use of be indicates that a subject repeatedly does an action or embodies a trait. In General American English, however, the use of be means only that an individual has done an action in a particular tense, such as in the statement "She was singing".

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been the center of controversy about the education of African-American youths, the role AAVE should play in public schools and education, and its place in broader society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Bybee</span> American linguist

Joan Lea Bybee is an American linguist and professor emerita at the University of New Mexico. Much of her work concerns grammaticalization, stochastics, modality, morphology, and phonology. Bybee is best known for proposing the theory of usage-based phonology and for her contributions to cognitive and historical linguistics.

Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Anne Vainikka was a Finnish-American linguist specialising in the syntax of Finnish and in the syntax of second language acquisition (SLA).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Harris (linguist)</span> American linguist and caucasologist (b. 1947)

Alice Carmichael Harris is an American linguist. She is Professor emerita of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Canadian linguist. Her main area of research is the field of language variation and change.

Ellen Broselow is an experimental linguist specializing in second language acquisition and phonology. Since 1983, she has been on the faculty of SUNY Stony Brook University, where she has held the position of Professor of Linguistics since 1993.

Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

References

  1. "Lisa Green - UMass Amherst Faculty Webpage". January 6, 2017.
  2. "Lisa Green Awarded Distinction by Board of Trustees". 8 August 2020. Retrieved August 13, 2020.
  3. "Lisa Green". people.umass.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-11.
  4. "List of PhD alumni from the Department of Linguistics at UMass Amherst" . Retrieved January 6, 2017.
  5. 1 2 "Lisa Green | Department of Linguistics | UMass Amherst". www.umass.edu. Retrieved 2020-06-10.
  6. "Lisa Green - Faculty Webpage" . Retrieved January 6, 2017.
  7. "Google Scholar Lisa J. Green". scholar.google.se. Retrieved 2018-09-02.
  8. Green, Lisa, and Thomas Roeper. “The Acquisition Path for Tense-Aspect: Remote Past and Habitual in Child African American English.” Language Acquisition, vol. 14, no. 3, 2007, pp. 269–313. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20462494.
  9. "List of LSA Fellows by Year of Induction" . Retrieved January 6, 2017.
  10. "Language and the African American Child - Cambridge Extra". Archived from the original on October 18, 2014. Retrieved January 6, 2017.
  11. "African American English - Sociolinguistics - Cambridge University Press" . Retrieved January 6, 2017.
  12. The Oxford Handbook of African American English. Oxford Handbooks. Oxford University Press. June 2015. ISBN   978-0-19-979539-0 . Retrieved January 6, 2017.
  13. "The Acquisition Path for Tense-Aspect". Language Acquisition. 14: 269–313. doi:10.1080/10489220701471024. S2CID   32819172.
  14. "Lisa Green". people.umass.edu. Retrieved 2018-12-13.
  15. Seymour, Harry N.; Bland-Stewart, Linda; Green, Lisa J. (April 1998). "Difference versus deficit in child African American English". Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. 29 (2): 96–108. doi:10.1044/0161-1461.2902.96. PMID   27764431.