Research

In 2020, the world was challenged with the the COVID19 pandemic, and many nations looked toward the United States to see how to deal with the myriad of problems it brough. Using corpus linguistic methods, this project looks at how the language used by the White House under the Trump Administration changed over time. Special attention is paid to language from the domains of economics, health, wellness, protection, crisis, and governance.

Relevant scholarship

"Presidential Rhetoric, Unmasked (w/ Dr. Cameron Mozafari)" re:verb, 27 July, 2020. link. 

“Cognitive Corpus to Political COVID Discourse.” UCLA Discourse Lab. Los Angeles, CA. October 2021. 

As the world moves closer and closer to irreversible consequences of climate, it has become increasingly apparent that, as George Lakoff (2010) has argued, we lack the basic language to talk about climate change in non-expert settings. Furthermore, the language of economics that has, since the early 21st century, dominated international climate change (e.g., carbon outputs, carbon market, carbon credits, carbon debt) and has, as economic discourse often does, disconnected everyday lived experience from our climate reality. Or worse, the language of climate change pigeonholes endangered species currently being effected by the anthropogenic sixth extinction without attending to how climate change is currently affects humans in the forms of food insecurity, mass migration, and global inequality.  Now more than ever we must figure out a way of talking about climate change. This project seeks to understand what kinds of language works to educate and motivate people, as well as how to entrench and teach that language.

Relevant scholarship

“Carbon Compounds and the Need for Climate Neologisms.” Researching and Applying Metaphors (RaAM). Panel: Metaphoric Structuring of Critical UN Sustainability Issues. Białystok, Poland. September, 2022.

“Why Frames Matter: Analyzing and Constructing Frames in Climate Discourse.” University of Colorado at Boulder. Boulder, CO. January, 2022.

This project seeks to better understand how language that encodes and cues sensory simulation. Classical rhetoric handbooks often suggest using vivid language to arouse emotions, but what exactly makes language "vivid"? Are certain words or phrases vivid? Is it the use of attributive adjectives? Using insights from Cognitive Grammar, I suggest that the phenomenon of vividness has to do with granularly construing events and deicticly repositioning viewpoints. Following from this, certain kinds of lexical and grammatical constructions should correlate with vivid construals: verbs of mental state in environments of commands or imperative clauses, deictic shifting, and imperfective aspect marking. This project currently only investigates English constructions, specifically in vivid language in fundraising appeal letters, but plans to expand to crosslinguistic analyses of Iranian Persian and Mandarin Chinese.

Relevant Scholarship

"Sustaining or Overcoming Distance in Representations of U.S. Drone Strikes." Discourse and Society , vol. 5, no. 3, 2024. With John Oddo and Alex Kirsch. 

"Constructing Fictive Common Ground in Persuasive Discourse," International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Nishinomiya, Japan. 2019.

"Classical Techniques for Achieving Mental Visualization: Fictivity, Simulation, and Vividness," Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. New Orleans, LA. 2019.

"Fictive Common Ground and the Grammar of Persuasive Discourse." Conference of the High Desert Linguistics Society. Albuquerque, NM. 2018.

Linguistics and the cognitive sciences provide many insights into how we process language and information, but for those insights to be of any use in the writing classroom, language and cognitive scientists must learn how to share them with writing teachers, and those teachers must in turn be convinced to listen. Along with Michael Israel, I propose a pedagogical program that frames grammar as a means of controlling conceptualization, rather than as the set of correct sentences. The basic goal is to get students to recognize and learn to use grammatical constructions that do important intersubjective work (e.g., discourse particles, clausal connectives, clausal complement constructions, modal constructions, figurative language). Whereas the old prescriptivism informs students what not to say, the new prescriptivism encourages students to draw on useful constructions to say what is most effective.

Relevant Scholarship

"Applying Insights from Cognitive Linguistics: The Linguistic Construction of Thoughts and Feelings," Conference on College Composition and Communication, Portland, OR. 2017. With Michael Israel.

"Reframing Prescriptivism: Rhetorical Construction Grammar and L1 Writing Instruction," International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Newcastle, UK. 2015. With Michael Israel.

"How Cognitive Linguistics Can Help Students Master Academic English," Conference on College Composition and Communication, Tampa, FL. 2015. With Michael Israel.