Anja Wanner
Assistant Professor
608-263-3807
awanner@wisc.edu
http://mendota.english.wisc.edu/~awanner
http://www.english.wisc.edu/ell/
Degrees and Institutions
PhD, University of Goettingen, 1999
MA, University of Goettingen, 1992
Research Interests
Theory of grammar, English syntax and morphology, lexical semantics, text analysis, genres of academic discourse, language change. I am currently finishing a book on the English passive construction (to be published by Mouton de Gruyter) and I am co-editing a volume on approaches to syntactic variation and genres.
Selected Publications
- "Comfort Zones of Orality: How Participants Override the Structural Characteristics of a Discussion Forum". To appear in Sally Magnan (ed.): Mediating Discourse Online. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
- "The Limits of Variation in Scientific Abstracts - Syntactic and Functional Constraints". ITL - Review of Applied Linguistics, 2004. 37-60. (co-authored with Heidrun Dorgeloh)
- Structural Aspects of Semantically Complex Verbs (2001, ed. with Nicole Dehe). Frankfurt: Peter Lang
- Verbklassifizierung und aspektuelle Alternationen im Englischen (1999). [Verb Classification and Aspectual Alternations in English] Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer
- Articles on agentivity, transitivity, psych verbs, cognate objects, event structure, and scientific English
Teaching
I teach undergraduate and graduate courses in English linguistics, with a focus on syntax and morphology, including historical and psycholinguistic aspects.
Personal Statement
In a linguistic conversation with Alice, Humpty Dumpty, who is otherwise very confident about lexical semantics ("When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean"), concedes that "some words have a temper"-"particularly verbs: they're the proudest-adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs." The "temper" of English verbs, the relationship between their meaning and their behavior in syntax and morphology, is the focus of my research. As a linguist, I am committed to the idea that "grammar" is part of every speaker's implicit knowledge of his or her native language. In the courses I teach, I discuss ways to make this knowledge visible, using the framework of generative grammar, complemented by functional approaches.