Introduction

[Roderick A. Jacobs]

Since one of my students has already introduced himself and berated
me for dilatoriness, here goes. I am a professor of linguistics and
English as a Second Language, with a split appointment between our
linguistics department and our department of ESL at the University
of Hawai'i, of which I am presently chair. Both are graduate depart-
ments offering work on discourse. My colleague, Gabriele Kasper,
does fascinating work on interlanguage pragmatics.

My first degree was in English at the University of London, with
specializations in Anglo-Saxon and 20th century European drama.
I took master's degrees in English education, mainly literature,
and linguistics at Harvard and UCSD respectively. I studied
generative grammar at MIT with Noam Chomsky and wrote (with
P. Rosenbaum) a textbook on it (and a GB text in 1995). My Ph.D.
from UCSD was on syntactic change in three Amerindian languages and I
spent a further year on a grant to work on the oral literature of the
languages.

At Hawai'i, I've taught various syntax courses, a literature seminar for
teaching overseas, and more recently a 3-course grad discourse sequence.
Although I find systemic work very useful, I tend to focus on cognitive
approaches, particularly Fauconnier's Mental Space framework and the
Deictic Shift theory from the Narrative Discourse Research Group at
SUNY Buffalo. My last paper, presented at the Fourth Conference on
CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE, DISCOURSE, AND LANGUAGE, was "Discourse Cueing
and the Idealized Reader", which I hope will appear in the Proceedings
volume.

Cheers,

Roderick A. Jacobs				956-2800
Professor of Linguistics
Moore 551

"A ...shortcoming of modern work ... is the sharp emphasis on
separating components (e.g., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic)
and attempting to study the grammatical or meaning structure
of expressions independently of their function in building up
discourse, and independently of their use in reasoning and
communication. In fact, discourse configurations are highly
organized and complex within wider social and cultural contexts,
and the raison d'etre of grammatical constructions and the words
within them is to provide us with (imperfect) clues as to what
discourse configurations to set up."
					      Fauconnier, 1997