Catherine O'Connor
Position:		Associate Professor; Director, Program in Applied Linguistics (CAS/GRS);
Department:		Literacy, Language, Counseling and Development (SED)
Program:		Program in Applied Linguistics (CAS/GRS)

Educational History

Ph.D. Linguistics�University of California, Berkeley
M.A. Linguistics�University of California, Berkeley
A.B. Human Language�Stanford University

Contact Information
Phone:		617/353-3318
E-mail:		mco@bu.edu

Profile

Dr. O’Connor’s research and teaching interests are in linguistics and applied linguistics. Her current work in linguistics includes a cross-linguistic study of the morphosyntax and pragmatics of complex noun phrases, and on-going work on Northern Pomo, a previously undescribed indigenous language of North America. Within applied linguistics, her work centers on classroom discourse, the role of language in standardized assessments and in literacy development and in mathematics learning. She is currently principal investigator of a grant funded by the National Science Foundation on the strategic use of discussion in middle school mathematics classrooms. She has published books, journal articles and book chapters in on her linguistic and applied linguistic research. In addition to her teaching in the Literacy, Language and Cultural Studies specialization, Dr. O’Connor is also director of the Program in Applied Linguistics in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Courses Taught

CAS�LX501 �Linguistic Field Methods
CAS�AN521 �Sociolinguistics
SED�LS751 �Language Universals and Universal Grammar
SED�LS726 �Discourse Analysis
SED�RS650 �Foundations of Inquiry

Selected Publications

O'Connor, M.C. (under review). External possession and utterance interpretation: a crosslinguistic exploration. Submitted to Journal of Linguistics.
Garretson, G. and O’Connor, M.C. (under review). Between the humanist and the modernist: semi-automated analysis of linguistic corpora. Proceedings of the Fifth North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics.
O’Connor, M.C. (2003). Differential possessor expression: Are pair-wise comparisons ever required? In Butt, M and T. King, (Eds.) Proceedings of the LFG03 Conference. CSLI Publications. http://csli-publications.stanford.edu. Pp. 119-140.
Fillmore, C.J., Kay, P. and O'Connor, M.C. (2003). Regularity and idiomaticity in grammatical constructions. In Michael Tomasello (Ed.) The New Psychology of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure, vol.II. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Reprinted from Language, 64(3) (1988): 501-538.
O'Connor, M.C. (in press). The implicit discourse genres of standardized testing: What verbal analogy items require of test takers. In J. Cook-Gumperz (Ed.), The Social Construction of Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chapin, S., O’Connor, C., and Anderson, N. (2003). Classroom Discussions: Using Math Talk to Help Students Learn, Grades 1-6. Sausalito, CA: Math Solutions Publications.
O'Connor, M.C. (2002). "Can any fraction be turned into a decimal?" A case study of a mathematical group discussion. In Kieran, C., Forman, E., and Sfard, A. (Eds.), Learning Discourse: Discursive Approaches to Research in Mathematics Education. The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Pp. 143-185. (Reprinted from O'Connor, 2001, in Educational Studies in Mathematics, Vol. 46.)

Selected Presentations

OConnor, M.C. (April 28, 2006). Logistic recreations: Modelling the possessive alternations in English. Joint Workshop in Syntax and Semantics. Department of Linguistics, Stanford University.
O’Connor, M.C., A. Anttila, V. Fong, J. Maling (2004). Differential possessor expression in English: Re-evaluating animacy and topicality effects. Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 9-11, 2004. Boston, MA.
Skarabela, B., O’Connor, M.C., & J. Maling (2004). The mono-lexemic possessor construction: pragmatic constraints in the noun phrase. Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, January 9-11, 2004. Boston, MA.
O'Connor, C., and Amy Rose Deal. (2005). Database tools for documenting endangered languages: A linked electronic dictionary-textbase and learner tools for Northern Pomo. Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Held at the Annual Meeting of the LSA, Oakland, CA, January 7, 2005.
Garretson, Gregory; M. Catherine O'Connor (2004). A combined automatic and manual method for studying discourse features in corpora. Paper presentation at The Fifth North American Symposium on Corpus Linguistics, May 21-23, 2004. Upper Montclair, NJ.
O’Connor, M.C. and A.R. Deal. (July, 2003). Differential possessor expression: Are pair-wise comparisons required? LFG03: 25th Annual Conference on Lexical Functional Grammar. Workshop on Native American Languages. SUNY Albany, held at Saratoga, NY. July 19-21.
O'Connor, M.C. (May, 2003). Implicatures and event frames: Interpretive consequences of the external/internal possession alternation. Conference on the Linguistic Encoding of Three-Participant Events: Crosslinguistic and Developmental perspectives. The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL. May 14-16.
O'Connor, M.C. (July, 1999). Harmonic alignment of the animacy hierarchy and the structure of possessive DPs in Northern Pomo. Workshop on Native American Languages, LFG 99. University of Manchester, Manchester UK.
O’Connor, M.C. (January, 2005). Repeating, resaying, and revoicing: inferring the teacher’s purposes. Presentation at the Datafest Symposium, during the The Sixteenth Annual Winter Conference on Discourse, Text and Cognition. January 21-24, 2005 Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
O'Connor, M.C. (May, 2002). "Can any fraction be represented as a decimal?" A case study of position-driven discussion. Invited presentation, International Conference on Qualitative Research in Classrooms, sponsored by the Spencer Foundation and the Centro de Investigaci�n y Estudios Avanzados, Mexico City, DF.

Selected Grants

National Science Foundation (REC-0231893), three-year grant to conduct controlled study of the efficacy of focused classroom discussion on mathematics learning in middle school. C. O’Connor, PI; S. Chapin, Co-PI. ($733,000)�(2003-2006).
National Science Foundation (BCS-0080377), grant to conduct a crosslinguistic study of interactions among pragmatics, semantics, and morphosyntax within determiner phrases. Three years: ($158,854), one year supplement ($31,000). C. O'Connor, PI.�(2000-2003).
Spencer Foundation (#200500105), one year grant to develop a suite of open-source software tools that will enable researchers to easily transform text files of multi-party discourse into an XML format that can be coded, analyzed, and searched with a graphical user interface. ($27,000). C. O'Connor, PI.�(2005-2006).