Department of Linguistics
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.