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. Routledge. Forthcoming.
- 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.
