Linguistics professor Joan Bybee has been chosen as the 49th annual Research Lecturer, the highest honor for UNM faculty.
Bybee will present her research lecture, "Say it again: How usage shapes language," at 7 p.m. tonight at the Continuing Education Building Auditorium.
"It is a great honor," Bybee said. "There are certainly lots of excellent researchers on campus."
She said when she entered the field of linguistics, most of the research revolved around abstract linguistic structures, and not much attention was paid to meaning and usage patterns.
"My research has involved applying the study of meaning and usage to the question of why languages have grammar, and why grammar takes the form it does," she said.
Bybee, who has been in the field of linguistics for more than 30 years, said she was chosen after being nominated, and then letters were then sent in to attest to the importance of her research.
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"Part of the criteria has to do with the quantity of the research, but more than that, the quality - how influential the that research has been," Bybee said.
She said the research she will present tonight will demonstrate how frequency of use affects words and phrases.
"One result shows that grammar is not fixed and static, but changing all the time," Bybee said. "An example would be 'I'm going to.' We actually say 'gonna,' which means we intend to, which implies the future. That's just one example of how English has changed through usage."
She said over the span of 30 years of research, she has studied 75 languages, concentrating on future tenses and where it came from and how it has evolved. Bybee said she is now focusing her research on texts, both older and modern stages of English.
"From that we hope to discover the patterns of usage," Bybee said. "We want to know how people actually produce language, and how they string together words and groups of words to make coherent speech."
She said there are various applications of her research in today's society.
"One is teaching English as a second language," she said. "The more we know about mental representations of language, the better. It also helps us understand how children develop language skills, which is important if children are having difficulty learning."
The Annual Research Lecturer award is not the first time Bybee has been recognized as a leader in the field of linguistics. She has been awarded 17 grants and fellowships, including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and five National Science Foundation grants. She has also written and co-edited several books on linguistics, and is the president of the Linguistic Society of America.
