Studies in Meaning: English Bare Singular Count Nouns—syntax and pragmatics
I investigate the occurrence of English nouns seen in such phrases "in town", "at school", "in prison", and "on campus". These are unusual forms for ostensible count nouns because they are found with neither an article nor a plural marker, an occurrence not well accounted for under current theories of nominal syntax. I have found that although they appear to be individual words, these bare count nouns have the distribution of full noun phrases. Besides being marked in their grammatical form, their use in English can convey meaning as a type of definite or generic NP. Studies of these forms have applications in cross linguistic studies of noun phrase syntax, intended meanings of referring expressions, and the teaching of the article system to students of ESL.
Studies in Meaning: Ambiguity and Health Discourse—semantics and corpus studies
To examine linguistic indicators of American health beliefs, I am compiling a corpus of contemporary forms of popular media used to convey health information to Americans. (CADOH -- the Corpus of American Discourses on Health.) My initial findings show ways that ambiguous terms are used differently within specialist and vernacular discourse. This includes competing, often misleading uses of the terms "fat" and "cholesterol" as well as conflicts in the framing of the larger health discourse, including competing and conflated uses of the term "health literacy." These separate senses entail different conclusions about the causes of low health literacy, showing how analysis of terminology can help identify separate intended meanings and also provide information to facilitate more effective exchanges among participants of health discussions.
Stvan, Laurel Smith. Review of Corpora for University Language Teachers. TESL-EJ 13, no 2, September, 2009.
Book Review
Review/Commentary/Criticism
Published
2009
Stvan, Laurel S. 2009. Semantic Incorporation as an Account for Some Bare Singular Count Noun Uses in English. Lingua 119(2). 314-333.
Journal Article
Refereed/Juried
Published
2009
Stvan, Laurel Smith. Review of Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. International Cognitive Linguistics Association, 2009.
Book Review
Review/Commentary/Criticism
Published
2008
Stvan, Laurel S. 2008. Health Literacy: A Single Meaning or Three Senses Conflated?. The Language of Health Care: Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Language and Health Care. Alicante, Spain: IULMA.
Conference Proceeding
Non-Refereed
Published
2008
Stvan, Laurel Smith. Review of Advice Online: Advice-giving in an American Internet Health Column. Language in Society. 37.5: 765. 37, no 5, 2008: 765.
Book Review
Review/Commentary/Criticism
Published
Presentations and Projects
--WORK ON BARE SINGULAR COUNT NOUNS IN ENGLISH--
2009. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Where Are They Bare? The Frequency and Distribution of Bare Nouns in American English." Presented at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL 2009), University of Alberta, Edmonton, Oct. 10, 2009.
2009. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Learning English Bare Singulars: Corpus Approaches for the L2 Classroom" Presented at the 5th Corpus Linguistics Conference, University of Liverpool, July 22, 2009.
2006. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Two Bare Singular Uses in English with Incorporation Traits." Presented at the Nominal Incorporation and its Kind conference (NIK), Univ. of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Feb. 20, 2006.
2005. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "The Functional Range of Bare Singulars." Presented at the Workshop on Nominal Determination at the 27th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS). Cologne, Germany. February 23, 2005.
2002. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "The Behavior of Locative NPs Found in Bare Singular Form." Presented at the GIAL Academic Forum. Dallas, TX. April 22, 2002.
2001. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Three Functions of Bare Singular NPs: Familiarity Implicature, Activity Implicature, and Generic Referring Expressions." Presented at the English Linguistics Speaker Series. Salt Lake City, UT. January, 2001.
2000. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Categories of Locative NPs Found in Bare Singular Form." Presented at East Carolina University. Greenville, NC. February.
2000. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Semantic Classes of Bare Singular NPs." Presented at the 74th Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America. Chicago, IL. January.
1999. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Bare Singular NPs as Generic Expressions." Presented at the 73rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Los Angeles, CA. January.
1997. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Leaving Home to Meet at School: Testing for Familiarity NPs." Presented at the 71st Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Chicago, IL. January.
1993. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Activity Implicatures and Possessor Implicatures: What Are Locations When There Is No Article?" Presented at the 29th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, IL, April 22.
--CORPUS WORK (on AMBIGUITY IN HEALTH DISCOURSE, BRAND NAMES, DISCOURSE MARKERS)--
2008. Fauzi, Sarah, David Silva and Laurel Stvan. Panel presentation on "Linguistic Aspects of Cross-Cultural Health Discussions," to be presented at the 2nd Annual TAHIT Symposium on Language Access (Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators), Fort Worth, TX. April 26, 2008.
2008. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Fat and Health Literacy: Two Revealing Terms in CADOH (Corpus of American Discourses on Health)." Presented at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics (AACL 2008), Brigham Young University, Provo, UT. March 15, 2008.
2007. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Health Literacy: A Single Meaning or Three Senses Conflated?" [La alfabetización en salud: Una sola acepción o tres significados combinados?] Presented at the 1st International Conference on Language and Healthcare, Alicante, Spain. October 24, 2007.
2007. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Compounding Literacy: Examining Disciplines In Which Mastery Surpasses Words." Presented at The 5th International Conference on the Book, Madrid, Spain. October 20, 2007.
2006. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Tracking Contextual Clues to Interpreting Coined Brand Morphology." Presented at the American Association of Applied Corpus Linguistics conference (AAACL 7), Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, AZ. October 21, 2006.
2006. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Lexical Conflation and Edible Iconicity: Their Mnemonic Power in Vernacular Discussions of Food." Presented at the 4th Interdisciplinary and Multicultural Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film, and the Other Arts, Dept. of Modern Languages, UT San Antonio. February 24, 2006.
2005. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Productivity in English -ex Nominals Used as Trade Names." Presented at the Department of Linguistics Colloquium, UT Austin. May 9, 2005.
2003. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Diachronic Change in The Discourse Markers Why and Say In American English." Presented at the XII Susanne Hübner Seminar (Corpus Linguistics: Theory and Applications for the Study of English). Zaragoza, Spain. November 20, 2003.
2002. Stvan, Laurel Smith. Why and Say: "Two Discourse Markers in Depicted Conversation." Presented at the High Desert Linguistics Society V. Albuquerque, NM. November 1, 2002.
--WORK ON LANGUAGE AND PEDAGOGICAL TECHNOLOGY--
2006. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Using EndNote Bibliographic Software for Library Research." Presented at the Dept. of Linguistics and TESOL Brown Bag Discussion Series. UT Arlington. March 29, 2006. (handout)
2003. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Discourse Markers in the Classroom." Presented at TESOL 2003 (ITA-IS Academic Session on "Engagement as a Critical Component of Effective Teaching.") Baltimore, MD. March 28, 2003.
2003. Y. A. Aslandogan, S. Vana, P. Boppana, V. Mariappan, L. Stvan. "Empowering Educators in Visual Learning: Information Extraction and Visualization for, Automatic Generation of Multimedia Presentations." Presented at the 14th annual international conference of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). Albuquerque, NM. March, 2003.
2002. Serdiukov, Peter and Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Characteristics of ESL Web Sites." Presented at TESOL 2002 (by P. Serdiukov). Salt Lake City, UT. April, 2002.
2002. Stvan, Laurel Smith. "Reference and Deixis." Presented as guest lecture for CSE 6331 Advanced Topics in Database Systems: Data Mining and Information Extraction. UT Arlington. November 7, 2002.
2001. Serdiukov, Peter, and Stvan, Laurel Smith. ESL/EFL Websites: What Should Teachers and Students Be Prepared to Find On the Internet? Presented at WebNet 2001 World Conference on the WWW and Internet. Orlando, FL. October.
Affiliations
Professional Association Memberships
American Dialect Society--ADS (2005-current)
Association of Computational Linguists--ACL (2005-current)
Linguistic Society of America--LSA (1990-current)
--member of the LSA Committee on Membership Services and Information Technology (2007-2010)
National Council of Teachers of English--NCTE (1987-88)
Phi Kappa Phi, all-discipline honor society
--inducted in 1986 as a student member, UIC chapter; founding member in 2007, UTA chapter
Appointments
Duration
Rank
Department / School
College / Office
University / Company
2008-current
Associate Chair
Department of Linguistics and TESOL
College of Liberal Arts
University of Texas at Arlington
2007-current
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics and TESOL
College of Liberal Arts
University of Texas at Arlington
2001-2007
Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics and TESOL
College of Liberal Arts
University of Texas at Arlington
1999-2001
Clinical Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics
University of Utah
1998-1999
Lecturer
Department of Communication
DePaul University
1996-1998
Instructor
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University
1993-1994
Instructor
Department of Foreign Language
University of Science and Technology of China
1994
Instructor
English Lanuage Program
Roosevelt University
1990-1993
Instructor
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University
1992
Instructor
English Lanuage Program
Roosevelt University
1986-1988
Instructor
Department of English
University of Illinois at Chicago
Synergistic Activities
Departmental Service
Graduate Advisor, Department of Linguistics and TESOL (2003-present) Web Server Administrator and Computer Lab Coordinator (2002-present) Member of Faculty Search Committee (Spring 2004, Spring 2008, Chair Fall 2008) Member of Student Financial Support Committee (Spring 2003-present, Chair Spring 2002, Spring 2008) Member of ad hoc committee to make recommendations for Distinguished Record of Research award (Spring 2002, Spring 2003, Spring 2005) Member of Periodic Review Committee to review unit chair (Spring 2005) Member of ad hoc grade grievance committee (Spring 2004, Spring 2005)
Abstract Reviewer
Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) 2008.
Conference on Education and Information Systems: Technologies and Applications (EISTA) 2005; 2007; 2008.
Fifteenth annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, 2001.
Peer Reviewer for Journal Articles
Journal of Asian Pacific Communication, 2008.
GLOSSA, 2006-present.
Support
Duration
Title
Sponsor
Amount
Status
2006-2007
"Semantic and Semiotic Aspects of the Public Discourse of Health and Nutrition"
UTA Research Enhancement Program Grant (REP)
$6838.00
Previous
2003
"Towards 'Proactive' Multimedia Databases: A Self-sustaining Digital Library for Educators"
This course will explore some of the ways in which computer science and linguistics can inform each other. We will be concerned in particular with the ways in which computers can be used to both obtain the data that we examine and to provide the tools we use for analysis. A range of linguistic issues and problems that can benefit from computational approaches will be surveyed. These issues will be illustrated through readings and practical experience with several different concordance programs as well as sources of online corpora. No programming experience is required.
The course introduces the fundamental goals and techniques of current syntactic theory and the empirical facts it is based on. It also has the goal of putting you in a position to pursue more advanced study of the structure of human languages and to provide you with a foundation so you can go on to read, discuss, and apply current work relevant to your own research. After reviewing the basic concepts of modern grammatical theory, the course moves on to the principles of current theoretical syntax in general and the Minimalist Program in particular: phrase structure and constituency, the interaction of syntax and the lexicon, and the nature and type of structure-building and movement operations. Emphasis is placed on coherent argumentation and empirical justification for theoretical claims, as well as overall understanding of theoretical concepts and tools.
In this class we will be studying some of the ways in which the context and form of an utterance interact to affect our understanding of meaning. Our main topics this term will include reference, deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and the highlighting of information structure through word order and intonation.
This is a graduate-level course with two objectives:
• To provide practice in analyzing the impact of truth conditions, context, and speaker intention on the interpretation of meaning.
• To practice reading and discussing linguistic literature on pragmatics in order to gain insight into both theoretical aspects and practical applications of meaning construction in communication.
This course introduces you to the field of semantics, focusing on the representation of linguistic meaning at the lexical level. This semester topics will include logical relations, predication, componential analysis and prototype theory, the mental lexicon, connotation and euphemism, linguistic relativity, semantic roles and verb classes. This course serves as a Meaning and Use course for the MA and PhD course selections.
Download Syllabus (277.36KB. This syllabus was uploaded Wednesday 21st, January 2009 09:16:31 AM and is subject to change.)
This is a graduate-level course with three objectives for students:
* To obtain theoretical background with which to describe context-independent meaning at the word and sentence level.
* To practice analyzing the encoding of concepts in language and to learn to illuminate individual examples of lexical relations as well as patterns within a language.
* To practice reading and discussing primary source linguistic literature on semantics in order to gain insight into both theoretical aspects and practical applications of semantics as they may interact with other fields of linguistics.
Important Disclaimer: The responsibility for the accuracy of the information contained on these pages lies with the authors and user providing such information.
Faculty Profile
Mail Box: 19559, Hammond Hall, Room No.: 403 
817 272-3133 
