Lisa Green (linguist)

Dr. Lisa Green is a linguist specializing in syntax and African American English (AAE). She is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.^[1] In July 2020 she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.^[2]

Before beginning her graduate studies in linguistics, Green received a B.S. in English education at Grambling State University and then an M.A. in English at the University of Kentucky.^[3] Green then went on to receive a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1993.^[4]

After completing her Ph.D., Green spent 11 years at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of Linguistics,^[5] before going on to take up a position in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.^[5] There she founded and directs the Center for the Study of African American Language,^[6][7] a resource for students and educators dedicated to dialect and language-related issues. An enduring goal of Green's is to dispel notions of AAE as a substandard linguistic variety by demonstrating its systematic nature.

Green's work has focused on linguistic variation between different dialects of English, with a primary focus on African American English. Her research focuses on morphosyntactic systems in African American English like tense and aspect marking and negation,^[8] as well as first language acquisition of AAE by child speakers.^[9]

Green was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2016.^[10]

• Green, Lisa. (2011). Language and the African American Child. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780511975561.^[11]
• Green, Lisa. (2002). African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521891387.^[12]

• Green, Lisa, & Walter Sistrunk (2015). Syntax and Semantics. In Oxford Handbook of African American Language. Sonja Lanehart (ed.). Oxford University Press.^[13]
• Green, Lisa. (2014). Force, Focus, and Negation in African American English. In Micro-syntactic Variation in North American English. Raffaella Zanuttini and Laurence R. Horn (eds.). Oxford University Press.
• Green, Lisa, & Tom Roeper (2007). The Acquisition Path for Aspect: Remote Past and Habitual in Child African American English.” Language Acquisition. 269-313.^[14]
• Green, Lisa (2000). “Aspectual Be-Type Constructions and Coercion in African American English.”Natural Language Semantics, 8, 1-25.^[15]
• Green, Lisa, Linda Bland-Stewart, & Harry Seymour (1998). Difference Versus Deficit in Child African American English. In Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools. Vol 29 No. 2, p. 96 - 109.^[16]