Betty Birner

Betty Birner

Professor
Linguistics, Cognitive Science

Office: RH 226
Email: bbirner@niu.edu

Educational Background

  • Ph.D. Northwestern University; 1992
  • B.A. Hope College, Holland, Michigan; 1982

Professional Interests

  • Linguistic Pragmatics
  • Discourse
  • Reference
  • Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Selected Publications

  • Meaning: Semantics, Pragmatics, Cognition. 2023. Routledge. 
  • Pragmatics: A Slim Guide. 2021. Oxford. 
  • Language and Meaning. 2018. London: Routledge.
  • Birner, B. "On constructions as a pragmatic category." Language 94.2:e158-e179.
  • Introduction to Pragmatics. 2013. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
  • With G. Ward. 2011. “Discourse Effects of Word Order Variation.” In K. von Heusinger, C. Maienborn, and P. Portner, eds., Semantics: An International Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter 2: 1934-1963.
  • With G. Ward. 2009. “Information Structure and Syntactic Structure.” Language and Linguistics Compass .4: 1167-1187.
  • “Noncanonical Word Order and the Distribution of Inferrable Information in English.” 2009. In B. Shaer, P. Cook, and W. Frey, eds. Dislocation: Syntactic, Semantic, and Discourse Perspectives. Routledge.
  • With J. Kaplan and G. Ward. 2007. “Functional Compositionality and the Interaction of Discourse Constraints.” Language 83.2: 317-343.
  • With G. Ward, eds. 2006. Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.