Who's Visiting

Each year the Department of Linguistics welcomes visiting researchers to Georgetown University. For a list of the various visitors and their research, please visit the links below.

2010-2011

2012-2013 Academic Year

Najma Al Zidjaly

Biographical Information:

Najma Al Zidjaly is Associate Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. She is the editor of Building Bridges: Integrating Language, Linguistics, Literature, and Translation in English Studies (CSP, 2012). Her other publications include articles in Language in Society, Multilingua, Intercultural Management Quarterly, Visual Communication, Communication & Medicine, and Disability Studies Quarterly. Al Zidjaly is on the Editorial Board of Multimodal Communication. She is currently involved in three research projects: 1) A collaborative project with the School of Technology at Auckland University, New Zealand that examines the relationship between identity and social media (funded by the Multimodal Research Centre at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand). 2) A project on Arab (Omani) Identity and Social Media funded by Sultan Qaboos University, Oman. 3) A collaborative project with Syracuse University and Howard University on Cellphones as Cultural Tools.

Research Statement:

1. I am editing a book entitled Social Media, Cultural Practices & the Arab Spring. The edited book is built upon the premise that social (and non-social) media are cultural tools used by social actors to create action; as all cultural tools, they have not just affordances but also limitations. Thus, this book, in contrast to other books on social media and Arab identity, is not a celebration of social media or the mainstream mono-view that portrays a simplistic and isolated view of "The Arab Spring." Instead, its collective chapters examine how intricately people in various Arab countries use or have used social media, flyers and banners, other artifacts, discourse and language to promote and/or pacify protests, and to negotiate their identities, current, past and future. The volume’s purpose is to highlight the agency of the social actors involved in the current events sweeping across Arab countries, and to offer unique and nuanced perspectives that do not take for granted ungrounded claims propagated by the news media. It rather questions through analyzing discursive and non-discursive data these mainstream views, highlighting human agency and what people actually did/do in negotiating the current changes, while simultaneously contextualizing the various experiences and linking them to their broader societal local and global discourses and ideologies.

2. I am writing a book entitled Disability, Discourse & Technology: A Multimodal Analysis of Inclusion. This work combines several key topics, all of which are the focus of intense current interest: disability studies, discourse analysis, and the effects of emerging technology. Specifically, the book provides the first systematic, academic examination of how inclusion, a major concern in the lives of those with disabilities, takes place through discourse, narrative and technology. It also provides the first qualitative case study of how one person with a disability combats social exclusion verbally and technologically, thereby highlighting the agency of persons with disability. In so doing, it offers the first multimodal account of the interrelationship between technology and disability across cultural, religious, and social contexts. The project builds on and extends a case-study analysis of one quadriplegic man’s everyday uses of technology, especially his computer-related practices, to combat the marginalization and isolation afforded to him by the cultural ideologies towards disability in the country in which he resides, Oman. This book thus brings together three important strands of research: disability studies, technology studies, and the Middle East in a way that has never been done before.

Wencheng Gao

Biographical Information:

Wencheng Gao is Professor of English Department at Shanghai Ocean University. He gained his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Shanghai International Studies University in 2007. His research interests are in the fields of cognitive linguistics, contrastive linguistics, applied linguistics, language philosophy and translation. He has published seven books. His two most recent works are The Essentials of Linguistics and a Learning Guide (2007), A Contrastive Study of Existential Sentences in English and Chinese from a Cognitive Linguistic Perspective (2008). He has published over twenty academic papers in quality journals in China. He has taught linguistics, applied linguistics in Wuhan University of Technology. His current work is a Shanghai Municipality Education Commission-funded project over contrastive studies of constructions in English and Chinese from a cognitive perspective. With innovation of cognitive linguistic framework and illustrations based on corpora, he is one of the core researchers in the field of contrastive study between English and Chinese in China.

Research Statement:

Cognitive Linguistic Perspective: A Contrastive Study of Constructions in English and Chinese
—— Based on the Corpora of ANC and CCL
Born out of long-term interest and accumulative research experience, a contrastive study of four fundamental constructions in English and Chinese will be conducted within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics. The following four constructions: (1) the temporal and spatial constructions, (2) the dinominal endocentric constructions, (3) the ditransitive constructions, (4) the existential constructions, will be investigated in detail based on corpus data and then presenting cognitive interpretations.

The central tenet of Cognitive Linguistics (Lakoff 1987,1999; Langacker 1987,1991; Taylor 2002 )- the inseparability of syntax and semantics - came at a time when the lingusitic community widely accepted the status of syntax as an autonomous formal system. Of course, the leading theoretical framework of Transformational-Generative Grammar is very powerful in explaining the inner language competence of human beings. Each school of linguistic theories has its own strengths and weaknesses. Instead, Cognitive Linguistics set forth the following three closely related claims:

(1) Semantic structure is not universal; it is primarily language-specific, based on conventional imagery and dependent on knowledge structures;

(2) Grammar does not constitute an antonomous formal level of representation. Instead, it is symbolic in nature, and consists of conventional symbolization of semantic structure;

(3) There is no meaningful distinction between grammar and lexicon. Lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a continuum of symbolic structures, which differ along various parameters but can be divided into separate components,

A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods will be employed. The English Language data for each construction will be collected from the American National Corpus (alternatively the British National Corpus). The Chinese language data will be gathered from the Center for Chinese Linguistics corpus (CCL, Peking University). Following the collection of language data, relevant linguistic information will be verified, and non-homogeneous pieces will be discarded. Then the facts will be collated, subcategorized and processed using a descriptive statistics technique. A qualitative method will then be adopted to interpret the constructions seeking universals from an angle of typology. It is also hoped that some natural and revealing accounts hiding behind the differences of the constructions will be discovered from a perspective of cognitive linguistics. For instance, the temporal and spatial constructions in English and Chinese differ in the order of representation because the speakers construe the same situation by adopting different cognitive paths. Chinese usually prefer the construal in the way of “from periphery to center”, while English native speakers are inclined to construe the image by moving “from center to periphery”.

The insights of this kind are significant in understanding the nature of human language, and also practically helpful in teaching English and Chinese as a foreign language.

Wukyung Ko

Biographical Information:

Wukyung Ko received a Ph. D degree at Department of English Education at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea in 2011. Her dissertation topic was referential choices and anaphora resolution of second language learners. Her research interests include various topics in applied linguistics, especially on-line processing of second language comprehension and production, learning and teaching of formal aspects of second language linguistic knowledge as well as cultural issues in language teaching and learning.

Research Statement:

English conditionals, involving use of subjunctive mood, have been thought of as one of the most difficult grammatical features to acquire by L2 learners as well as L1 speakers. Though some studies focused on the acquisition of this difficult structure, the findings of previous studies are not consistent, in need of clarification. First of all, it is not still clear as to why certain types of English conditionals are more difficult to acquire than others, and, as a result, acquired later than others. Second, the difficulty order of different types of English If-conditionals in production and comprehension was different across different studies. Finally, participants in these studies are either those with various L1 backgrounds or those with the same L1. It is believed that studies comparing the data from the speakers of a controlled number of languages are in need so as to shed light on the issues of language transfer more clearly.

The objective of the study is to explore whether and how three factors including input frequencies, grammatical complexities and L1 influence the acquisition of conditionals by Korean-speaking and Spanish-speaking learners of English through collecting comprehension and production data. For this purpose, an experiment with two subparts, each focusing on comprehension and production respectively, will be performed. In the first part, an inference task will be employed in order to assess the participants’ comprehension of the various types of conditional sentences. In the second part, a controlled composition task will be employed to assess their production of the conditionals.

Through examining and comparing influences of the various factors in one study, the study is believed to provide us with valuable clues as to how these factors influence the acquisition processes of If-conditionals differently. Especially, by employing learners with two different L1 backgrounds, the study is expected to show clearly how the learners’ L1 influences the acquisition order of If-conditionals. In addition, the study is expected to produce pedagogically fruitful results that can be useful for class instruction of English conditionals.

Michal Marmorstein

Biographical Information:

I have completed my Bachelor and Master degrees in the Linguistics Department at the Hebrew University. My training as a linguist involved the study of a number of modern and ancient Semitic and Indo-European languages, as well as the study of structural, functional and text-oriented linguistic theories. My dissertation studies the syntactic distribution and function of the verbal forms in Classical Arabic prose. Considering a wide range of textual, syntactic and lexical features, I try to define the relation between verbal syntax and the categories of cohesion, deixis and reference (particularity and genericity), syntagmatic compatibility and lexical classes. Studying a literary language, my research also extends to the analysis of genre, style and register, and their interaction with the syntactic structure exhibited in Classical Arabic prose.

During the years of my study I have taught courses on Arabic syntax and the Arab grammatical tradition at the Hebrew University. I have published a number of articles on the topics of my research on verbal syntax in Classical Arabic.

Research Statement:

My dissertation studies the syntactical distribution and function of the verbal forms in Classical Arabic prose. The starting point of my research is the ‘aorist’ form yafʿalu; rather than trying to ‘expose’ the form’s invariant - aspectual or temporal - meaning, as was repeatedly done in the past, I aim at identifying its typical uses and systemic interrelations with other verbal forms. In my work I try to confront the general question of context definition and demarcate the pertinent and consistent features which operate in a specific instance of communication, that can be further generalized to a set of such communications. To reach this end I apply a multi-leveled analysis to my data, considering the referential (or deictic), textual, macro-syntactic (inter-clausal), micro-syntactic (clausal) and lexical levels. Studying a literary language, my research also extends to the analysis of genre, style and register, and their interaction with the syntactic structure exhibited in Classical Arabic prose. My research now is at its final stage: while I am at Georgetown I intend to integrate my findings into a systemic description of the verbal system of Classical Arabic, which will be preceded by an outline of my theoretical premises and the linguistic framework of my analysis.

Other research projects in which I participate: In the course of the last two years, I was a research member in the Swedish Academy funded research project: “Circumstantial Clause Combining in Semitic: A Comparative Study”. The work of the group was concluded by a conference in August 2012 in Kivik, Sweden, and will be followed by a publication of the results of the study.

Another research project in which I am involved is the writing of a handbook of Egyptian Arabic, based mainly on written texts (together with Prof. Gabriel Rosenbaum, The Hebrew University). I intend to follow and complete this project by another one, this time based on the analysis of spoken texts that were recorded from Egyptian women during the years 2009-2011, while I was living in Cairo. In this research I wish to deepen and refine my understanding of the structure of conversational narratives in spoken Arabic and, in a later stage, compare it with the structures observed in narratives in literary Arabic.

Kyong-Sook Song

Biographical Information:

Kyong-Sook Song received a Ph.D. in Linguistics with concentration on sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and discourse analysis, from Georgetown University in 1993. Dr. Song's research interests have included language and gender, TV live debate, presidential debate, argument strategies, conflict management, metaphor and metonymy, narrative, cross-cultural communication, English education and language policy, computer-mediated cyber communication, global English, and World Englishes. Professor Song's books include Discourse Analysis: Analyzing Conversation and Debate (2002) and Discourse and Pragmatics (2003), which were selected as an excellent book by the National Academy of Science, Republic of Korea, and Understanding Global Society English: World Englishes (2007). Prof. Song has served on the editorial boards of several journals, and currently serves as a vice-president of the Linguistic Society of Korea.

Research Statement:

During her visiting research at Georgetown, which is supported by the Professors Overseas Research Grant of the National Research Foundation of Korea, Dr. Song investigates English face-to-face conversations and computer-mediated communication (CMC). CMC has emerged as an important new communication modality, and the significance has been demonstrated through its continued growth (Herring 1996, etc). The present-day world status of English as a global language is primarily the result of two factors: the expansion of the British colonial power, which peaked towards the end of the 19th century, and the emergence of the U.S. as the leading economic power of the 20th century (Crystal 2003, etc.). English is no longer the language of the English native speakers; English belongs to the world. There are pressing needs for understanding and accepting various types of English, World Englishes, which are emerging for various communicative needs in many countries and speech communities. Dr. Song plans to investigate cross-cultural/linguistic differences among/between American university students and Korean university students in the U.S in face-to-face conversations and computer-mediated communication on World Englishes.

Shoko Yohena

Biographical Information:

I am currently a professor in the Department of English Literature at Ferris University, Yokohama, Japan. I hold a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University.

Research Statement:

The overall theme of my research interest is “identity and positioning changes observed in Japanese narratives,” including such aspects as gender differences, influence of media on communication and education. Recent research on narratives came to employ a wider range of narrative data including “small stories” (Bamberg 2004, Georgakopoulou 2007) of naturally occurring discourse, imaginative stories, narratives on CMC etc., rather than the traditional narrative “cannon” of life-stories obtained through interviews. I have been working on narratives of imaginary stories by Japanese children, gender differences observed in narratives of married couples’ conversations, and written testimonies found on church websites by Japanese Christians. My most recent interests include narratives found in coaching and counseling sessions. Even though the scope of the research may seem wide, the underlying point of view in analysis is consistent; identity and positioning changes in Japanese narratives. During my visit at Georgetown University, under Dr. Hamilton’s guidance, I intend to continue to explore how positioning and identity change in narratives. I also would like to explore the interactive nature of narratives and its influence on shaping of narratives taking more interactionally sensitive approaches to narrative identity (De Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012).

The findings should shed some light to understanding the relationships between language and identity, and how Japanese use narratives to create, challenge, and sustain relative identities among participants in various contexts.

2011-2012 Academic Year

Toshiko Hamaguchi, Department of English Language and Literature, University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo, Japan

Toshi Hamaguchi holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University. She is a lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of the Sacred Heart, Tokyo. Her research interests include communication ‘of’ and ‘with’ aging population in private and public settings; particularly physician-patient interaction, and intergenerational family discourse. Currently her research focuses on discourse of people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia. Her latest work-in-progress includes investigating communication between elderly residents and nursing home staff and among the elderly residents.

During her research visit, under the guidance of Dr. Heidi Hamilton, Toshi intends to continue working on elderly discourse, particularly in the institutional setting. The research explores the following aspects: how the institution plays a role in participation framework (as compared with, e.g., private family conversational setting), how elderly residents position themselves in their cohort community, and how communication improves lives of the aging individuals and elderly care in the institutions. She also pursues her long-term research on vertical analysis of the life story of the same person over years (‘vertical analysis’ in this case is similar to ‘vertical tasting’ of wine in which you taste the same wine from different vintages).

Hiroyuki Tahara, Associate Professor, Sapporo University, Japan

Polysemous expressions in English are difficult items to teach and learn because of their multiple meanings. Polysemy no longer seems to be regarded as a problem in contemporary cognitive linguistic research (Nerlich and Clarke 2003, among others). In Japan, however, overarching concepts of polysemous words that are capable of operating in all instances of use have been published on books, dictionaries and website (Masamura 1989, 2002, Tanaka 2003). Tahara (1999) demonstrates that the overarching concept of the English conjunction and preposition as is “correspondence” and that the concept promotes interpretation of sentences containing as. The author has been teaching English polysemous expressions, not only words but also constructions such as participial constructions and is-to construction, using overarching concepts, and these concepts seem to work well for various learners. These polysemous constructions have been little studied to date (Hasegawa 1996, Goldberg). Thus, it is worth reconsidering theoretical issues on polysemy, especially about polysemous construction in terms of teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language Learning.

In recent years, declining academic abilities of students in universities, senior high schools and junior high schools is a serious social problem in Japan. As far as English education is concerned, many university students in Japan are on 1st year level (for 13 year-olds) in junior high school. Effective English education is necessary for Japan in this international era. Even in this situation, overarching concepts seem to work well in teaching English polysemous words and constructions in the author’s teaching experience for over 15 years. However, this effective approach is not yet well-known: many teachers of English in Japan do not know this approach. So this cognitive linguistic approach should be provided not only by teachers during class but also with something ubiquitous on a large scale.

E-learning system is one of ubiquitous ways of learning. Newton Company Limited in Japan developed “TLT Soft” system, an e-learning system with automatic iteration. After accumulating certain number of incorrect questions, the system asks the learner all the incorrect ones at random until the learner can give the correct answers to all the incorrect ones three times in a row respectively. This is repeated in five stages at the most.

The author published an e-learning course with a textbook for junior high school level on “TLT Soft” in 2010. He developed this course, because it is necessary for General English classes at his university and there was no good existing teaching material for beginners at all in Japan. Existing teaching materials for basic English have insufficient number of questions, and explanations for the questions are not given to all of them. Moreover the explanations are partial, so learners cannot understand them and they are not useful for beginners. He is planning to develop an e-learning course with textbook for high school level, based on effective cognitive linguistic approach.

Objectives
The objectives of this research are to
(a) reexamine theoretical issues (e.g., polysemy, monosemy, principled polysemy) on multiple meanings of polysemous words in light of their overarching concepts in terms of teaching and learning English as a Foreign Language,
(b) examine the relation between overarching concepts of participial constructions and is-to constructions and their various meanings in light of their overarching concepts
(c) examine the effects of the e-learning course that will be developed by the author.

2009-2010 Academic Year

Wukyung Ko

The study is to explore factors affecting Korean EFL learners’ choice of reference forms and pronoun resolution processes. It will compare the learner data with both native speaker date as well as Korean data to explore possible influence of L1. Furthermore, both off-line and on-line data will be gathered so as to explore the product and the process of the L2 learners’ use of referential forms

While communicating, we frequently refer backward of forward. For the successful communication, it is vital for the listener to identify what the speaker is currently referring to. For that matter, the more specific the referential form, the higher the possibility of successful communication. However at the same time, human beings have limited time, energy, and patience, and therefore, desire for economy in communication. This tension results in various referential forms varying in terms of their lexical specificity, ranging from various forms of zero anaphors, through pronouns to proper names.

Different languages employ different systems of referring to people, place, things, ideas and etc. As learners learn lL2, they need to acquire anaphoric systems of the target language to successfully communication in it. However, it has not been properly studied how L2 learners’ choice reference forms and/or pronoun resolution processes differ from those or native speakers. Especially, the influence on their L1 on the process of the acquisition has largely been neglected unlike other fields of applied linguistics. By exploring the factors possibly affecting L2 learners’ understanding and using anaphoric forms, the study is expected to shed light on the process of L2 acquisition. In addition, it is expected to produce pedagogically fruitful results, which can guide teachers where to focus when teaching in class.

Svetlana Nedelcheva

The main task of this project is to study spatial prepositions and their equivalent Bulgarian prepositions and to prove that they have one central meaning from which all the rest have derived. Not all the different meanings are distinctive but all of them are semantically motivated and are systematically connected. In other words, applying the Cognitive approach it has to be shown that their many different meanings are interrelated.

This task needs a research corpus to be collected. It will be divided in two sections: original and translated. The original corpus of minimum 3000 excerpts in English and Bulgarian will be taken from American and Bulgarian media texts and scientific literature. Moreover, for studying preposition meanings on textual level there will be a corpus of academic spoken English. Participants will be native speakers, university lecturers and students. Conversations will be recorded during lectures and seminars.

The translated “English (foreign language)  Bulgarian (native)” corpus will be based primarily on fiction. The validity of the translation equivalents fans will be verified through a control corpus.

Following Tyler and Evans’s terminology (2003) the distinctive but connected sense will be analyzed in association with each spatial preposition and will be represented as constructing a cognitive semantic network, organized in relation to a single basic meaning. Ideas, borne by this analysis, will be applied later in other classes of words (for example, particles).

An important task is also finding the cognitive basis of spatial prepositions in human experience. We are looking for the roots of the meanings of this word class on a specific level of our spatio-physical interaction with the world. That’s why the study of spatial prepositional meanings aims at finding out the relationship between the language, mental representation and human experience.

2008-2009 Academic Year

Marissa Patulli Trythall

During my time at Georgetown University, I will be carrying out research in the Lauinger Library Special Collections Research Center under the supervision of Professor Solomon Sara. This research, conducted in support of my thesis: “Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the American Jesuit contribution to ’s Educational System: Baghdad College”, will center on the Edmund A. Walsh Papers. Father Walsh, founder of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and of this Linguistics Department, was also instrumental in founding and nurturing Baghdad College in 1931. I look forward to the absolutely unique opportunity of working with Father Sara - a native Iraqi who studied and later taught at Baghdad College – as my mentor and guide in this research.

2007-2008 Academic Year

Najma Al Zidjaly, Ph.D.

I will work on two research projects; I will complete a manuscript on the relationship between language, disability, and technology and edit the proceedings of Sultan Qaboos University’s 2007conference on language, literature and translation. My first project brings together four important standards of research: discourse analysis, disability studies, technology studies and the Middle East. Specifically, it examines the interrelationship between cultural, religious, and legal conceptualizations of physical disability and the ways disabled persons use computer-mediated communication as a tool to com bat social isolation across contexts. The project builds on and extends my previous case-study analysis of one quadriplegic man’s everyday uses of technology, especially in his computer-related practices, to combat the marginalization and isolation afforded to him by the cultural ideologies towards disability in the country in which he resides, . My in-depth ethnographic research of the Omani man’s face-to-face and computer-mediated interactions coupled with my examination of public government pamphlets about disability and numerous technological artifacts suggest that technology is an important resource by which disabled persons can construct agentive identities and negotiate social inclusion. I am excited to have the opportunity to pursue this research in the stimulating environment offered by Georgetown’s Department of Linguistics.

My goal is to prepare a manuscript in which I provide a scholarly description of the interrelationships between disability and computer-mediated communication across cultural, religions and social contexts, integrating my findings with a qualitative sociolinguistic analysis of actual interactions between a disabled person and members of his various social circles. This manuscript will be of interest to scholars in linguistics, communication studies, disability studies, and related fields; I also hope my manuscript will be of relevance for people interested in cross-cultural comparisons, the experiences of disabled people, and how computer-related technology functions for its various users.

For my second project, I will be editing the Sultan Qaboos University’s 2007 conference proceedings on Building Bridges: Integrating Language, Linguistics, and Literature in Pedagogy and Research. Editing these proceedings is a tremendous opportunity at this stage in my career, and I believe that developing my professional editing skills will complement the experience of working on my own book.

Ataliba Castilho, Ph.D.

Discursivization as a Process of Linguistic Creativity: The Role of Prepositions

My interest of going to GU funded by a Brazilian agency will keep building my theory about language as a complex and dynamic multisystem, mainly in its discourse grounds. A second objective is to study discursive uses of Prepositions in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) in a diachronic point of view.

Motivations for mentioned theory came from an interpretation of the findings of two collective projects of research I chaired.

The project for the Grammar of Spoken Brazilian Portuguese (1988-2002) fully described the educated variety of BP. Eight volumes of essays have been published since then: Castilho Ed. 1990, 1993), Castilho/Basilio (Eds. 1996), Ilari (Ed. 1992), Kato (Ed. 1996), Koch (Ed. 1997), Neves (Ed. 1999), and Abaurre/Rodrigues (Eds. 2002). The consolidation of the texts began this year: Jubran/Koch (Eds. 2006). Four additional volumes are coming. This initiative provided Romance Linguistics with its first grammar of the spoken variety.

A new nationwide project took place in 1997, the “Project for the History of Brazilian Portuguese (PHBP)”, aiming to investigate the history of Brazilian Portuguese: Castilho (Ed. 1999), Mattos e Silva (Ed. 2001, Alkmim (Ed. 2002, Ramos (Ed., in print), Lobo (Ed., in print).

Eight state capitals got involved: Sao Paolo, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, Salvador, Joao Pessoa, Belo Horizante, Curitaba and Florianopolis. I chair the paulista team, which presently comprises forty researchers. PHBP embodies four subprograms: (1) diachronic corpus of BP, (2) sociohistory of BP, (3) grammatical change of BP, (4) discursive genres change in BP.

Mean-Young Song, Ph.D.

What I’d like to do during my stay at Georgetown will be to do some research on the semantics of the Korean temporal expressions, specifically focusing on the Korean tense marker of –ess. There have been many controversial arguments about the grammatical status of –ess since it can occur in various contexts such as past and prefect contexts. Thus, some say that it is a past tense marker, and others say that it is perfect marker which is similar to the English present perfect. Besides, there are also scholars who argue that –ess is semantically neutral like modal verbs and the conversational background, a set of propositions mutually accepted by participants in the conversation, determines what imperfection of –ess is the most appropriate. For example, if the conversational background is related to the past context, then -ess is most likely to be interpreted as conveying past eventualities. In contrast, if the conversational background is about the perfect context, -ess is highly likely to refer to perfect eventualities. This indicates that the interpretation of I can explain not only why –ess occurs in various contexts, but how we can capture the most appropriate meaning of –ess in a variety of contexts it is used.

2006-2007 Academic Year

Worawanna Petchjik

The main purpose of this study is to gain some insight into how Thai doctors and patients conceptualize concepts or experience of cancer by using Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) framework as a tool to find conceptual metaphors about cancer which entrench in their cognitions. In addition, six steps of metaphor identification purposed by Steen (1999), which provides a more precise way to analyze both linguistic and conceptual levels, and approach purposed by Semino et al (2004) will also be employed.

Since some metaphors seem to be used to convey some discourse purposes, this study also aims to find the relevant between conceptual metaphors and discourse purposes. This study, therefore, will be an attempt to relate cognition and language usage which will not only be beneficial for linguistic study but also for developing better communication between physician and cancer patients in the future.

2005-2006 Academic Year

Woonil Baik, Ph.D.
My research interests are in the field of Phonetics and Phonological analysis with emphasis on coarticulation. Under the supervision of Prof. Sara, I plan to show the articulatory difference between the Korean affricates and the English affricates using Electropalatography. Though the Korean affricates, by many phoneticians, are considered having the same place and manner of articulation as the English affricates, the articulation of Korean affricates is quite different from that of English affricates. My research goal aims to show that the articulatory difference between the Korean affricates and the English affricates results from the different coarticulatory pattern of the stop portions and the fricative portions composing the affricate sounds.

Maria Iakovou, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Linguistics, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

My research interests focus on learning and teaching Greek as a Second Language. I have been involved in many projects concerning syllabi and teaching materials development, tests construction and evaluation. I am particularly interested in the research conducted at your Department regarding Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy. During my two-month visiting research at Georgetown University, under the supervision of Prof. Tyler, I plan to expand my knowledge on the pedagogical implications of Cognitive Grammar with special focus on issues regarding teaching of the Greek modal verbs. Greek, as English, has a closed class of modals realizing under the same morphological form the modal distinction between necessity and possibility in deontic and in epistemic terms. The cognitive perspective seems to offer a unified framework in order first, to link the separate modal meanings and second, to develop their teaching account.

Junichi Kasajima, Ph.D.
Junichi Kasajima is a professor of applied linguistics of Sophia University, Tokyo. He is affiliated with the Department of Linguistics as a visiting researcher for the academic year of 2005-2006. His major area of research is Teaching English as a Foreign Language in Japanese contexts. For the past 20 years he has been engaged in foreign language education and has been compiling the New Horizon English Course, a textbook series for Japanese junior high school students. The series is approved by the Japanese Ministry of Education and currently used by 41% of Japanese public junior high school students. Being the head author, he is in the position to further improve its content and strengthen its theoretical underpinnings. He is planning to pursue his objective under the guidance of Dr. Kendall King by gaining insight into recent developments in the fields of SLA and Bilingualism.

Kyong-Sook Song, Ph.D.
During my visiting research at Georgetown University, I plan to explore the cross-cultural issues in computer-mediated communication (CMC). I am especially interested in cross-cultural differences in implicature among American students and Korean students in the U.S. in/between face-to-face conversation and the Internet Relay Chat (IRC). I have been interested in CMC for about 5 years, and I've presented papers at the international conferences and published papers on comparative analysis of English and Korean CMC. I have received a grant from the LG Yonam Foundation, and Dr. Deborah Tannen is my departmental sponsor.

Monthira Tamuang, Ph.D., Lecturer of Linguistics, Department of Linguistics Naresuan University,Thailand

My major academic interest is Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics of Thai, my native tongue, and Myanmar, the national language of Mynmar. Although Myanmar language program has been available in many tertiary institutions, research studies on Myanmar discourse and sociolinguistics are very few. My dissertation is on discourse markers in Mynmar and I believe that my investigation can clearly tell the relationship between forms and functions of the language. In addition, Discourse and History is another topic of my interest and I strongly believe that a year at Georgetown University will enable me to develop other topics related to Discourse Analysis and Sociolinguistics. I would like to express my sincere thanks to Prof. Deborah Schiffrin for sponsoring me to be here and the Office of the National Tertiary Education Board and Naresuan University for providing me the research grant.

2004-2005 Academic Year

2003-2004 Academic Year

Woonil Baik, Ph.D.
My research interests are in the field of Phonetics and Phonological analysis with emphasis on coarticulation. Under the supervision of Prof. Sara, I plan to show the articulatory difference between the Korean affricates and the English affricates using Electropalatography. Though the Korean affricates, by many phoneticians, are considered having the same place and manner of articulation as the English affricates, the articulation of Korean affricates is quite different from that of English affricates. My research goal aims to show that the articulatory difference between the Korean affricates and the English affricates results from the different coarticulatory pattern of the stop portions and the fricative portions composing the affricate sounds.

Elena Ciprianova, Ph.D. Candidate
I am a visiting researcher at the Department of Linguistics for the academic year 2003-2004. I come from Slovakia where I teach in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra. My research interests are in the field of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis with emphasis on cross-cultural aspects of the communication process, the study of similarities and differences in cultural rules of interaction, symbol interpretation and meaning production. I'm particularly interested in the implications of sociolinguistic and pragmatic studies for foreign language education and for the development of a model of language teaching which aims at building intercultural communicative competence of Slovak students of English. During my stay at the Department I am working with Dr. Deborah Schiffrin.

Nada Šabec, Ph.D., Professor of English and Head of the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Maribor, Slovenia.

I came to GU as a visiting researcher and a Fulbright scholar for the spring semester of 2004. My sponsor at GU is Professor Ralph Fasold. My primary objective is to learn more about the mechanisms and the nature of language change in Slovene resulting from Slovene-English language contact. One context in which it is possible to study this contact is of course Slovenia itself, but an environment in which these processes are much more pronounced is among the immigrants of Slovene descent in the United States. Washington, DC, with a relatively small number of Slovene Americans will make an ideal comparison with my previous fieldwork conducted in the largest Slovene-American community in Cleveland (Half pa pu: The Language of Slovene Americans, 1995). The emphasis will be on two dimensions of language use: functional and structural, the former referring primarily to the degree of mother tongue maintenance across generations and to the relationship between this and the speakers' feeling of ethnic identity; the latter having to do with observing typical discourse strategies and patterns of language use on various linguistic levels. In addition, my research will address the cross-cultural component of communication. This is an area that I began to explore two years ago and which resulted in the book Across Cultures (2001). In it, I examined aspects of Slovene-British-American intercultural communication and I would now like to take my research one step further by adding the missing Slovene American link. I am particularly interested in the way various speech acts are carried out and possibly misinterpreted by speakers of the two languages. Eventually, I would like to incorporate my findings into a book on the sociolinguistic and cross-cultural aspects of language use in smaller Slovene-American communities in the United States.

Choong Whan Woo, Ph.D.
Dr. Choong Whan Woo, an associate professor in the English Department of the Korea Naval Academy, is a visiting researcher for the academic year of 2003-2004.

His research goal aims to compare Korean and English rules of speaking in an attempt to discover to what degree such rules are culturally specific and are different across cultures. Under the supervision of Dr. Jeff Connor-Linton, he plans to analyze interactive patterns in an effort to identify such speech functions as addressing, complimenting, thanking, offering, and requesting. His interest is cross-linguistic analysis of politeness. The data collection strategies for this study include classroom observations and interviews with Koreans and Americans residing in the D.C. area. His research also attempts to explore the cause and effect of miscommunication, as well as how people repair such miscommunication.

2002-2003 Academic Year

Gemma Bel Enguix
Dr. Gemma Bel Enguix, a Lecturer in the Research Group in Mathematical Linguistics in Tarragona, Spain, is currently a Visiting Researcher in the GU Linguistics department. Gemma will be working with Dr. Inderjeet Mani on specific problems in the interpretation of temporal expressions in English and Spanish. Her research will include the evaluation of a computer program which helps determine the order of events in English news texts. She will also be collaborating with a team of researchers in the Linguistics department and the Medical Center on an NSF-funded text mining project aimed at identifying and linking protein names in the medical literature.

Jantima Eamanondh
Jantima Eamanondh is a visiting researcher for the academic year 2002-2003. She is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Her research is focused on Thai political debates as a kind of social action which achieves a number of institutionally specific purposes, namely position-claiming, persuading, negotiating, agenda-setting and opinion building, usually along ideological or party lines. Her interest is in the relationship between such political debates and Thai sociocultural practices. She is approaching this research through the framework of Mediated Discourse Analysis and during this year is studying with Professor Ron Scollon.

Laura Sgarioto

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