Ward Named Fellow of Linguistic Society of America

EVANSTON, Ill. --- Gregory Ward, professor of linguistics at Northwestern University, has been named a 2009 fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. He is one of a dozen professors around the country to be recognized by the society for distinguished contributions to the discipline of linguistics.

Ward's primary research area is discourse, with specific interests in pragmatic theory, information structure, international meaning and reference/anaphora. He is the author of dozens of papers and co-editor of "Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English," "The Handbook of Pragmatics" and "Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-
Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn."

Ward, who joined the Northwestern faculty in 1986, chaired the linguistics department from 1999 to 2004. He teaches courses on pragmatic theory, reference, information structure and language and gender. From 1986 to 1998, he was a consultant at AT&T research laboratories, working on intonational meaning.

Ward is a co-principal investigator on a National Science Foundation grant studying dialogue prosody for voice response systems. From 1991 to 1996, he was co-investigator of a National Institutes of Health grant on sentence processing.

In academic year 2004-05, Ward was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America from 2004 through 2007.