Carol Myers-Scotton | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1934 (age 90–91) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Some Semantic and Syntactic Aspects of Swahili Extended Verb Forms (1967) |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | |
Carol Myers-Scotton (born 1934) is an American linguist. She was a Distinguished Professor Emerita in the Linguistics Program and Department of English at theUniversity of South Carolina until 2003.[1]
She received herBachelor of Arts fromGrinnell College in 1955, and herMaster of Arts in English in 1961 andDoctor of Philosophy inlinguistics in 1967, both from theUniversity of Wisconsin–Madison.[2][3]
She resided inColumbia, South Carolina until 2003, where she was Carolina Distinguished Professor at the University of South Carolina in the Linguistics Program and Department of English. She currently resides inMichigan, where she is an adjunct professor in the Department of Linguistics and Languages atMichigan State University, and also a visiting scholar at the MSU African Studies Center.[2]
Myers-Scotton has authored or coauthored over 100 articles and book chapters in linguistics, primarily in the areas of contact linguistics,sociopragmatics,bilingualism andAfrican linguistics.[4] Much of her attention has been spent explaining the social and cognitive aspects ofcode-switching and bilingualism. In addition to her numerous articles, she has also published six books, includingContact Linguistics (2002) andMultiple Voices (2006).[1]
Myers-Scotton has received many grants and honors, including a 1983Fulbright Program grant to study language use patterns inKenya andZimbabwe, a 1994–1997National Science Foundation grant to study grammatical constraints on code switching (with co-PI Jan Jake), and a 2004–2005 National Science Foundation grant to test a hypothesis about the grammatical aspects of the abruptness of language shift.[5] Specifically, the study dealt withXhosa-English bilinguals inGauteng Province inSouth Africa aroundPretoria andJohannesburg.[1]
