Cynthia McLemore -- Home Page

Dr. Cynthia A. McLemore

3650 Spruce St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6024

215-417-5110

Education:
1991	Ph.D. in Linguistics	University of Texas at Austin
1987	M.A. in Linguistics	University of Texas at Austin
1980	B.A. in Philosophy (minor in Women's Studies)	University of Colorado at Boulder

Teaching Experience:
Spring 1999	Princeton University	Program in Linguistics and Program in Women's Studies
Spring 1994	Vassar College	Department of Anthropology
Spring 1993	University of Michigan at Ann Arbor	Program in Linguistics
1985-1990	University of Texas at Austin	Department of Linguistics
Courses taught:	Form and Function of English Intonation Language and Gender Discourse Sociolinguistics Introduction to Phonology Introduction to Linguistics

Research:

Intonation. This has been my focus in linguistics. I've especially been interested in identifying what intonation contributes to the meaning of an utterance. My approach to this problem has been empirical: uncovering the patterns according to which people use different tunes, or components of tunes. In my initial research, to constrain variation in both social settings and intonational forms, I went to the natural speech laboratory of a sorority -- where members are selected for homogeneity of socio-economic, ethnic, gender, and age identities and symbols, and interact in specific and often highly structured contexts. In the sorority, I observed and recorded speech within and across speakers (of different status) and within and across contexts (different kinds of meetings, dinners, fundraisers, etc.).

1991. The Pragmatic Interpretation of English Intonation: Sorority Speech. Austin, TX: University of Texas PhD dissertation.

1991. "The Interpretation of L*H in English." In Texas Linguistic Forum 32: Discourse. C. McLemore, ed., pp.175-196.

The conclusions I drew were mostly with respect to phrase-final boundary tones -- rises, falls, and levels. In particular, with respect to rises I argued against 'uncertainty', and even against 'nonfinality', as useful analyses of their meaning, and instead showed that they function as connectives, with more specific interpretations arising from their interaction with text and context.

This got taken up by the media in 1993 because of an interest in what was dubbed "uptalk" by James Gorman of the New York Times, a use of recurrent rises stereotyped as characteristic of young, usually female, speakers. The most interesting media coverage of the topic was done by Robert Siegel and producer Margaret Lowes Smith of All Things Considered, National Public Radio, and producer Richard Rosen on CBS television's "Eye to Eye with Connie Chung"; they actually went out and collected data, interviewing speakers and eliciting their judgments about the speech form.

During a 1991-1992 postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, I extended my research on intonational form and meaning by examining a highly constrained functional paradigm, telephone openings (in collaboration with Mark Liberman), and comparing the distribution of tunes in different speech genres.

1992. "The Stucture and Intonation of Business Telephone Openings." (with M. Liberman) 1992 Penn Review of Linguistics, 16: 68-83. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Department of Linguistics.

1992. "Prosodic Variation across Discourse Types." IRCS Technical Report 92-37, Proceedings of the IRCS Workshop on Prosody in Natural Speech, 117-128. Philadelphia: Institute for Research in Cognitive Science.

I have also collaborated with Mark Liberman and Tony Woodbury on a theory about the nature of prosodic phrasing (in particular, the nonexistence of the prosodic hierarchy and what gives rise to the perception of it), and presented it at Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht, Utrecht, Holland, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Language and Gender. This is a topic on which students in former classes have performed interesting and suggestive research; it's a fun topic to teach. I've addressed issues in language and gender with original research only from my dissertation study. In particular, the data from an all-female community in which speakers used many stereotypically feminine prosodic forms (as identified in the literature) provided evidence that those forms aren't necessarily used solely to convey emotion, but have particular distributions and identifiable discourse structural effects (e.g. pitch range variation used to delineate sections of narratives).

Lexicons. From 1994 until 1997, I directed the lexicon lab at the Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania. This involved hiring, training, and supervising a staff of graduate students and language teachers to create pronouncing lexicons in Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, German, and English for use in speech recognition research. In addition to the basic work of transcribing or correcting transcriptions of recorded telephone conversations, and creating initial online dictionaries, we worked on formulating phonological representations, resolving variation in recorded conversational pronunciations, marking morphological classifications (and in the case of Chinese, formulating word segmentation principles as well), and collaborating with the technical staff on developing finite state transducers for morphological analysis and synthesis. I left this position in 1997 to spend more time with my son.

1997. Garrett, Susan, T. Morton, and C. McLemore. LDC Spanish Lexicon. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. (cdrom)

1997. Huang, Shudong, X. Bian, G. Wu, and C. McLemore. LDC Mandarin Lexicon. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. (cdrom)

1997. Karins, K., R. MacIntyre, M. Brandmair, S. Lauscher, and C. McLemore. LDC German Lexicon. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. (cdrom)

1997. Kilany, Hanaa, A. Yacoub, H. Arram, A. El-Habashi, H. Gadalla, A. Shalaby, K. Karins, E. Rowson, and C. McLemore. LDC Egyptian Colloquial Arabic Lexicon. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. (cdrom)

1977. Kingsbury, Paul, S. Strassel, and C. McLemore. LDC English Lexicon. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. (cdrom)

1997. Kobayashi, Megumi, S. Crist, M. Kaneko, and C. McLemore. LDC Japanese Lexicon. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania. (cdrom)