I am Associate Professor of Linguistics in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LS&A), and in the Residential College (RC), both of which are at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor.
Here are some other Official links:
I am a general practitioner of linguistics, and I have a rather expansive definition of what that includes. From my Curriculum Vitae:
I've been concerned for a long time about an American linguistic dilemma:
on the one hand, Americans are really mystified about language, in my opinion
much more so than people in most other countries; there are a lot of reasons for this, but it's a fact. On the other hand, American linguistics,
which ought to be doing something to remedy this situation, has become increasingly
irrelevant to everything, including language, over the past few decades; there are a lot of reasons for this, too, but it's equally true
and equally depressing.
Rather than simply accepting this as the unfortunate situation we all
have to deal with, in a characteristically Quixotic attempt to do
something useful about the problem I've begun posting a series of Frequently Asked
Questions about English usage and grammar, written in a
non-technical style and intended for anyone concerned about language in
general and the English language in particular.
These complement my piece on
Frequently Asked Questions
on Linguistics, which is part of the
UM Linguistics Program Home Page.
I've also been concerned for a long time -- perhaps even longer -- about
another American educational problem: in addition to their general
ignorance about language, Americans are much more than usually confused
(and, I think, frightened) about mathematics. Indeed,
they boast about it:
In any event, in an equally quixotic attempt to do something useful
about this problem, I've been teaching a series of what I
call "Math Appreciation" courses over the years in the UM's Residential
College. Just as a Music Appreciation course
doesn't aim to make a musician of you, but rather tries to help you
understand why musicians do what they do, and why they think so highly
of it, a Math Appreciation course is not intended to produce more
mathematicians and still more failures, but rather to teach what
mathematics really is, what it's been (history is rather
important, after all), and what it's becoming. Most of
all, it tries to show the fun parts of math, the weird and crazy and
startling parts, the truly magnificent parts that burst on you like
Beethoven's version of Schiller. For that purpose, I've
found no better organizing source than Hofstadter's Gödel,
Escher, Bach, and that's the name and the principal text of the course I'm
currently teaching.
A few years ago, when I was chair of the Computer Committee of
the
Linguistic Society of America, the Commission on the Status of
Women in Linguistics was collecting syllabi from academics all
over the world who had been offering courses in Language and Gender.
I helped them get these into ASCII and up on the Linguistics Server,
and now that the Web is here, it turned out to be easy to make
them more widely available. There are 26, all dating from 1989-93,
so some things won't be completely up to date.
I also do quite a few things with computers.
As a linguist and semanticist, much of my interest centers on
the
metaphors people use in designing and using computers, and their
effects -- and their remedies.
This summer I taught a brief but instructive Computer Skills class in
a Science Camp at the UM. We put up
a few Web pages, which you are
welcome to look at and use, if you're interested.
I have developed some
software, which may be downloaded and distributed freely, with the
usual disclaimers.
Last change 1/16/97
"Math was never
my best subject"
"Oh, I'm no good at
math"
"Never could do that stuff"
etc. In fact, it is socially acceptable in our culture
to be mathematically illiterate; to experience the awesome stupidity of
this attitude, merely substitute words referring to some subject
Americans are willing to take seriously (sex, for instance) in these
disclaimers and imagine how likely they are. Perhaps if
we were left to pick it up on the streets like sex, we might take math
more seriously; or perhaps if it were taught as if it were an activity
that human beings could indulge in with pleasure, it might do a bit
better.
(Two shareware programs that are useful for dealing with downloaded
files are:
All this software is from the
Michigan Linguistics Archive, which I maintain.)