Faculty

John Haiman, professor and director of the Linguistics Program, has done research on syntactic change in Germanic languages, the grammar of Hua (Papua New Guinea), iconicity in syntax, the rhaeto-romance languages of Switzerland and Italy, and Khmer. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1989 for the study of sarcasm, and is the author of Talk is Cheap and other books.

Christina Esposito, assistant professor, has done research on the production of phonation (or voice quality) in Zapotec, Hindi, Marathi, and Bengali, and on the perception of phonation by English, Spanish, and Gujarati listeners. You can read more about her research here.

Cooperating Faculty

Satoko Suzuki, professor of Japanese, is the director of the Asian Languages and Cultures Department. She teaches Japanese language and linguistics courses. Her research interests are in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. She has published articles on the relationship between factivity and complementizers, the concept of topic in discourse, colloquial expressions, and discourse markers. She is currently writing a paper on expressions which have pejorative connotations in Japanese conversation. Satoko teaches Japanese language courses from Elementary level to fourth year, as well as Japanese linguistics.

Brooke Lea, professor of Psychology, specializes in human cognition, with an emphasis on higher mental processes. His research interests include theories of discourse comprehension, models of human logical competence, the interaction between culture and cognition, and comprehension processes involved in reading poetry. He serves on the editorial board of Psychological Bulletin. He teaches courses on cognition, psychology of language, experimentation and statistics, and introductory psychology.

Cynthia Kauffeld, assistant professor of Hispanic Studies, specializes in historical Spanish linguistics, particularly early Andalusian Spanish and American Spanish of the colonial period. Additional research interests include paleography and Spanish dialectology. She teaches all levels of Spanish language as well as upper-level courses such as Introduction to Hispanic Linguistics, Spanish Dialectology and History of the Language.

Joy Laine, adjunct professor of Philosophy, specializes in philosophy of the mind. She also does research in Indian philosophy.