New Faculty join Linguistics Department: Dr. Graham Katz and Dr. Michael Lempert
Michael Lempert joins Georgetown from the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned his Ph.D. in Linguistic and Sociocultural Anthropology. He has taught linguistic anthropology at PENN and at the University of California at San Diego, and he has served as an assistant editor for the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology since 2004. His research, which bridges the fields of linguistics and anthropology, has focused on verbal incivility at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India, especially as it manifests in courtyard debate and public reprimand. He is preparing a book that investigates how such incivility inculcates culturally valorized attributes in monks, and how changes in these practices reflect the influence of globally circulating ideals of the modern liberal speaking subject. In terms of the broader study of language use, Prof. Lempert's work has focused on the pragmatic functions of text-metrical ("poetic") structures in discourse, on stance and affect, and on the problematic of "scale" in the study of discourse. For graduate students this fall, he is offering "Argumentation and the Public Sphere," for undergraduates, "Language and Culture." In the spring of 2008, he will teach a graduate-level "Linguistic Anthropology" course and an undergraduate/graduate course on Language and Religion.
Graham Katz comes to Georgetown from the University of Osnabrück in (by way of Stanford), where he spent five years teaching computational linguistics at the Institute for Cognitive Science there. He holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics and Computational Linguistics (Cognitive Science) from the University of Rochester and is engaged in active research in both formal semantics and computational linguistics. His theoretical work focuses on temporal interpretation and addresses questions about the meanings of verbal expressions, aspectual operators and adverbial modification. In computational linguistics he has been engaged in the development of TimeML, a schema for the semantic annotation of newspaper texts with time and event information for application in information retrieval and question-answering systems. He is currently focused on addressing the ontological issues surrounding reference to abstract objects in discourse. This semester he is teaching Introduction to Natural Language Processing, and in the Spring he will offer a course on Computational Tools for Linguistics and a seminar on Computational Semantics.
