Georgia M. Green


Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.

Biography

Green earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1971. She was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University in 1978-79. She is a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where she was also a member of the Beckman Institute Cognitive Science Group.
Green has served as a peer reviewer or advisory editor for journals including Language, Linguistics and Philosophy, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Law and Social Inquiry, and Discourse Processes and publishers including Academic Press. Since 1997 she has served on the usage panel for the American Heritage Dictionary.

Research

Green's research explores areas of pragmatics that show the effect of speaker intention on language interpretation, including word order effects of information structure, discourse particles, and language applications to judicial contexts. Her first book on meaning in language was respected for daring to use example sentences with real political topics. Her book on natural language understanding was noted as admirably capturing the fact that “pragmatics is inherently interactive, that the central notions of the field... are properties of speakers and hearers, not of words or sentences.”

Selected publications

Books