Linda R. Waugh - Professor


M.A. (1965) French Literature, Stanford University
Ph.D (1970) Linguistics, Indiana University

Linda R. Waugh is professor in the Departments of French & Italian and English at the University of Arizona, and an affiliate of the Departments of Linguistics , Anthropology , and Language, Reading and Culture. She is currently Chair of the Graduate Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in Second Language Acquisition and Teaching (SLAT). She is also Co-Director of the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL), funded by the Department of Education. She is past president of the Semiotic Society of America, and is currently Executive Director of the Roman Jakobson Intellectual Trust. Before coming to the University of Arizona in 2000, she taught at Cornell University for many years and while at Cornell was Chair of the Department of Modern Languages.

She is both a French linguist and a general linguist, as well as a semiotician. Her main interests are in the function of linguistic structures (of all types), in the discourse-pragmatics of language, in written textual analysis (including journalistic and narrative texts), spoken discourse analysis (she has supervised the gathering of corpora for spoken French and American English), corpus linguistics, applied linguistics, grammatical and lexical semantics, history of linguistics, semiotics, and in the way language is integrated with other socio-cultural (semiotic) systems by which humans communicate and make sense of our world. Much of her data for research in these areas is centered on French, although she has worked on English as well. She has directed dissertations on many different languages of Europe, East, Southeast and South Asia, North Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific.

In addition to over 60 articles, she has authored, co-authored, and co-edited 11 books, among them The Sound Shape of Language, co-authored with Roman Jakobson. She is currently preparing The Cambridge History of Linguistics with co-editor John E. Joseph. She has published articles in journals such as Language, Lingua, Linguistics, Linguisticae Investigationes, Faits de langue, Modèles linguistiques, Journal of French Language Studies, Journal of Pragmatics, Text, Poetics Today, Semiotica, American Journal of Semiotics, Diacritics, as well as in edited volumes and encyclopedias. Recent publications include articles co-authored with University of Arizona and Cornell University current or former doctoral students: (1) Linda R. Waugh, Norma Barletta, Susan Smith, Elizabeth Specker, Shawn Steinhart, and Jue Wang, “Peircean Theory, Diagrammatic Iconicity and Academic Texts: Global Structure, Abstracts, and The Role of Narrative”. Invited article for: Logos and Language. Journal of General Linguistics and Language Theory , V:1, special issue on Iconicity. Published in 2004. (2) Linda R. Waugh, Bonnie Fonseca-Greber, Croline Vickers and Betil Eroz, “Multiple Empirical Paths to a Complex Analysis of Discourse”. Invited chapter for: Methods in Cognitive Linguistics: Ithaca, ed. Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Michael Spivey, Irene Mittelberg, and Seana Coulson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Published in 2007. (3) Irene Mittelberg, Thomas Farmer, and Linda R. Waugh. "They actually said that? An introduction to working with usage data through discourse and corpus analysis. Invited chapter for: Methods in Cognitive Linguistics: Ithaca, ed. Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Michael Spivey, Irene Mittelberg, and Seana Coulson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Published in 2007. Items in press include (1) Irene Mittelberg and Linda R. Waugh. Multimodal figures of thought: A cognitive-semiotic approach to metaphor and metonymy in co-speech gestures. In Charles Forceville, ed., Cognitive Approaches to Multimodality. 2) Linda R. Waugh. Pronominal Choice in French Conversational Interaction: Indices of Cultural Identity in Identity Acts. In Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen et al, eds., Organization in Discourse: The Interactional Perspective. John Benjamins.