Lisa Green

Lisa Green is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2016 Linguistic Society of America Fellow. Her research and teaching interests include syntax, syntactic variation, child language acquisition and development of African American English, and linguistics and education. She is the author of AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH: A LINGUISTIC INTRODUCTION (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and journal articles and book chapters on syntax and semantics of African American English (e.g., tense and aspect, negation, left periphery phenomena). Her work also addresses the practical applications of linguistic description of African American English in educational contexts. Green’s research on the development of language patterns in the speech of three-, four- and five-year-olds in African American speech communities, which was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, is reported in her book LANGUAGE AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAN CHILD, published by Cambridge University Press (2011). Green is also the founding director of the Center for the Study of African American Language at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Its goal is to foster and integrate research on language in the African American community and applications of that research in educational, social, and cultural realms. The Center will serve as a resource for communities across the country, with a commitment to furnishing information and training to educators who address language- and dialect-related issues. During the summer months, undergraduates from different universities in the country, including HBCUs (such as Howard University, Hampton University, and Tennessee State) have the opportunity to work on research projects in linguistics at the Center for the Study of African American Language. Before moving to UMass Amherst, Green taught in the linguistics program in the Department of English at Binghamton University (1994-1995), and she was also a member of the faculty in the Department of Linguistics at The University of Texas at Austin (1995-2006). She was an Old Dominion Fellow in the Linguistics Program at Princeton University in Fall 2009. Green holds a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, an MA in English from the University of Kentucky, and a BS in English Education from Grambling State University. She also completed postdoctoral fellowships at Temple University and Stanford University. She lives is Hadley, MA, with her husband Vincent Jackson and son Nasir, where she is working on her third book AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH THROUGH THE YEARS.