Linguists at UIC and their research interests

Pietro Bertone

Research in progress

• Greek purism in and out of Greece

• Surviving enclaves of the archaic Pontic dialect

• The semantic history of Greek prepositions

• Greek identity and its relation to the language

• A handbook of Greek syntax based on the courses devised for Oxford

Research interests

• Modern Greek Studies: culture, linguistics, history, and literature of Modern Greece

• Classics: Ancient Greek and Latin culture, language, literature, and society

• Mediterranean Studies: cultural interchanges of Greece, Turkey, and beyond

• Byzantine Studies: Medieval Greek philology

• Linguistics: phonetics, morphology, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics

• Languages: (besides Greek & Latin) Turkish, Romanian, Hebrew, Italian, Swedish

Richard Cameron

I work primarily in Sociolinguistics and Pragmatics, in Spanish and English, with additional interests in language instruction and learning. In sociolinguistics, I pursue quantitative dialect research with the goal of applying or testing linguistic and social theory. Among linguistic theories that have proven useful to me, I would include psycholinguistic work in Accessibility and Spreading Activation theory as well as research from Syntax, Historical Linguistics and Language Philosophy. From social research, I would include research into Age, Class, Gender, and Segregation along with differing conceptions of what counts as a social fact. In my recent research, I have attempted to draw on work from Social Psychology and Dialectology in order to describe and explain the effects of age and gender segregation on degrees of statistical difference between female and male speakers across the life span in Puerto Rican Spanish. Unlike class or ethnic differences, gender-based differences are assumed to result from social difference, not social distance. Yet much research reveals that females and males, both as children and adults, will segregate themselves or will be segregated to varying degrees. Such separation creates social distance. Social distance leads to linguistic difference. I am currently extending this by investigating the increasing degrees of statistical difference between girls and boys in two English-speaking Chicagoland elementary schools as they grow up within the framework of school.

Barry R. Chiswick

Barry R. Chiswick couducts research on the determinants of dominant language proficiency among immigrants and linguistic minorities, and the consequences of this proficiency. A bibliography of his language research is on his web page. His most recent book is The Economics of Language ( Routledge 2007 ), with Paul W. Miller.

Pedro Cordova

Research interests: the impact of service learning in L2 instruction; the effects of washback in L2 testing

Alejandro Cuza

Research interests: Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism, L1 Attrition, Spanish Morphosyntax and Semantics

Barbara Di Eugenio

My main area of research is Natural Language Processing (NLP), and its application to human-computer interaction, educational technology, and multimedia systems. My goal is to use NLP to support both education and instruction, and collaboration between human or artificial agents. The theoretical aspects of my research concern the linguistic analysis, and the knowledge representation and reasoning that support the understanding and generation of NL discourse and dialogue. All my research has its empirical foundations in both qualitative and quantitative corpus analysis, including data mining techniques.

Susan Goldman

Research interests: Language and text processing, discourse psychology, learning from multimedia materials, redesign of learning environments (curriculum, instruction, and assessment), teacher learning, instructional technology.

Kay E. González-Vilbazo

Research interests: Bilingualism, Code-Switching in syntax, morphology and phonology, syntax-semantics-interface, compositional semantics, Romance and Germanic languages. Methodology, Philosophy of Science, Cognition and Language

Elliot Judd

My research interests: Language Policy, especially on the United States; TESOL methodology and materials/curriculum design

Luis López

Current areas of interest: Syntactic theory and comparative syntax. Interfaces of syntax with phonology and information structure. The linguistic ideologies of linguists.

My main interest is the study of the syntactic structure of natural language and how a structure is interpreted. My approach is mostly comparative/contrastive and is inserted within a theoretical framework loosely labeled "transformational-generative". I am particularly intrigued by the set of hypotheses that constitute the Minimalist Program.

I am currently concerned with two main areas of research. The first area is information structure: roughly, how the structure of sentences reflects and adjusts to the information contained in the previous discourse. For instance, the sentences 'beans, I like' and "I like beans' convey the same meaning, in the sense that they refer to the same state of affairs, their difference lying in the fact that fronting 'beans' reflects an anaphoric connection with a previously mentioned entity. My second area of research involves the the PF linearization of syntactic constituents. I have explored the idea that c-command plays a role in the linear ordering of constituents, as Richard Kayne originally argued, but phonological principles that seek to maintain the prosodic integrity of extended projections may overrule the LCA.

As a secondary line of work, I have been interested in how language ideologies influence the work of linguists, in particular the narratives presented by historical linguists. Another focus of my research has been the morphosyntax of agreement and case systems and the dependencies generated by these, looking for the common ingredients of apparent diversity.

For my graduate and post-graduate work I wrote about ellipsis in natural language. For example, when an English speaker says "I have not', she is leaving out a lot of information which is, nonetheless, readily and unconsciously filled in by her interlocutors without apparent effort. I am fascinated by the mental processes that allow human beings to do things like this with language. Secondly, I am fascinated by the language variation one encounters. For instance, a word by word translation of "I have not" would be ungrammatical in Spanish or Basque; instead, in these languages one can say "I not", which is impossible in English. Linguists of my ilk believe that this variation can be studied systematically and that ultimately can be accounted for using linguistic principles of universal validity.

Colleen McQuillen

Research interests

• Language pedagogy, second-language acquisition, and instructional technology

• The literature and visual arts of the Molda Polska movement

• The Jewish Golem legend in twentieth-century Polish literature

• Russian and Polish experimental and animated films of the 1950s and 1960s

Kara Morgan-Short

My current research focuses on the investigation of the cognitive underpinnings of adult second language acquisition (SLA). Recent research conducted in the SLA field has significantly advanced our understanding of the phenomenon of learning a second language. This understanding may be further advanced by considering findings from the field of cognitive science, which has developed theories and models of the mind and has a multitude of methods for tapping cognitive processing. My research considers SLA issues in light of theories and models found in cognitive science and synthesizes research methodologies from SLA and cognitive science. By taking this interdisciplinary approach, I aim to provide unique empirical data that has the potential to distinguish theories and models of SLA and cognitive science models of language. In particular, my research addresses the following issues in SLA using behavioral assessments and event-related brain potentials (ERPs):

• the role of explicit and implicit knowledge and the effects of explicit and implicit training conditions;

• the role of attention and awareness;

• the role of types of practice

Rafael Núñez-Cedeño

Research interests: Spanish phonology, morphology, dialectology, and the acquisition of Spanish phonology.

Irma Olmedo

Irma Olmedo conducts research on children's bilingual development in the context of the school and the ways they use their two languages to interact with peers and adults. She also examines their metalinguistic and metacommunicative awareness and the meanings they give to their bilingualism, including the views they express about being bilingual. She has conducted research in two Chicago Schools with large numbers of Spanish/English bilingual children, focusing on the ways that they serve as language brokers for their less fluent peers. Irma is an Associate Professor in the College of Education and teaches two of the bilingual/ESL teacher education courses.

Kim Potowski

I am interested in Spanish use in the United States. This includes quantitative questions –Who uses Spanish, with whom, how often, and for what purposes? What does U.S. Spanish look like, for example, regarding the use of discourse markers? – as well as qualitative inquiries into the roles of Spanish in enacting U.S. Latino identities. I am particularly interested in language and identity configurations of mixed ethnicity Latinos such as “MexiRicans”.

These language use patterns and attitudes have implications for heritage language learning, for best practices in heritage language teaching, and in the professional development of heritage language teachers. I am particularly interested in dual (two-way) immersion schools as sites of K-8 Spanish heritage language development and of Spanish L2 learning. This interest in language maintenance has also led me to edit a book (in progress) of the top 11 non-English languages spoken in the U.S. with an eye toward understanding how minority languages can be preserved.

Gary Raney

Research interests: Psychology Department Chairperson. Language processing and reading, organization of memory, bilingualism, metacognition, attention, eye movements and event-related brain potentials.

Susanne Rott

Research focus: Second Language Acquisition, lexical development, development of formulaic sequences and lexical collocations, interrelationship between lexicon and grammar, the effect of classroom interventions, and CALL.

My main research focus is the encoding, storage and retrieval of individual lexical items, phraseologisms and lexico-grammatical constructions. My studies are based on linguistic descriptions and cognitive processes outlined in Construction Grammar. In particular, I investigate how form-meaning mappings develop across interrelated continua that mark partial to complete, weak to robust, and nontargetlinke to target like language use by second language learners in an instructed learning setting. I assess the effect of linguistic aspects, such as length and morphosyntactic complexity, cognitive aspects, such as attention and phonological working memory capacity and instructional aspects, such as awareness-raising and the effect of frequency.

Biljana Sljivic-Simsic

Current research: Working on a book of Serbo-Croation verbs

Current area of interest: Serbo-Croatian Language, Old Church Slavic and Comparative Slavic Linguistics.

Other : Serbian Women Studies (late 19th & early 20th century); Serbian Culture.

Giedrius Subacius

Research interests: Editing annual scholarly journal Archivum Lithuanicum (see at: www.lki.lt). I am also working on the project: History of European Standard Languages.

Jessica Williams

My research interests include second language writing and the effect of instruction in second language acquisition.

Xuehua Xiang

My research interests lie in linguistic-sociolinguistic work and second language studies. I am particularly interested in such areas as inter-language semantics/pragmatics, contrastive analysis (with a focus on pragmatic and semantic phenomena), interaction and grammar, second language writing, and Chinese as a second/heritage language. I am currently working on inter-language and L1 concept transfer in advanced ESL learners' written texts. From a discourse-pragmatic perspective, I am also engaged in research on interactional particles as well as preverbal particals in Southeast Asian languages, particularly Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, and Shishan (Hainan Island, China). My research in this area focuses on the linguistic marking of emotivity, evidentiality, and epistemic modality.