Department of Linguistics

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.

2008-2009
2007-2008
2006-2007
2005-2006
2004-2005
2003-2004
2002-2003

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

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.

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.

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