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Gregory Ward
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Gregory Ward
Gregory Ward is an American linguist, academic and researcher. He is Professor of Linguistics, Gender & Sexuality Studies and, by courtesy, Philosophy at Northwestern University.
Ward's primary research revolves around pragmatics, with emphasis on the pragmatic meaning associated with particular syntactic constructions and intonational contours. He is a collaborative author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, has co-authored Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English, authored The Semantics and Pragmatics of Preposing, and co-edited Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn.
He is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and served as its Secretary-Treasurer from 2004 - 2007.
Ward received his B.A. degree in Linguistics and Comparative Literature [with honors] from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 under the supervision of Ellen F. Prince.
Ward joined San Diego State University’s Department of Linguistics as a lecturer in 1985. In the following year, he joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991 and to Professor of Linguistics in 1997.
Ward chaired the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University from 1999 to 2004 and served as Co-Director of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN) from 2018 to 2024.
Ward has conducted research in the area of pragmatics, focusing on pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference. He has focused on pragmatic meaning associated with particular syntactic constructions and intonational contours. His later research investigates demonstratives, event anaphora, functional compositionality, and the semantics-pragmatics boundary.
With Julia Hirschberg, Ward has researched the pragmatics of fall-rise intonation and introduced two conditions for its felicitous use. He found that the fall-rise intonational contour contributed pragmatically to the utterance interpretation by conveying speaker uncertainty. Also with Hirschberg, he has worked on a series of utterance pairs and investigated the effect of pitch range, duration, amplitude and spectral features, regarding the interpretation of rise-fall-rise intonational contour. Their study indicated pitch range as having a main effect on interpretation selection.
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Gregory Ward
Gregory Ward is an American linguist, academic and researcher. He is Professor of Linguistics, Gender & Sexuality Studies and, by courtesy, Philosophy at Northwestern University.
Ward's primary research revolves around pragmatics, with emphasis on the pragmatic meaning associated with particular syntactic constructions and intonational contours. He is a collaborative author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, has co-authored Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English, authored The Semantics and Pragmatics of Preposing, and co-edited Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn.
He is a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and served as its Secretary-Treasurer from 2004 - 2007.
Ward received his B.A. degree in Linguistics and Comparative Literature [with honors] from the University of California, Berkeley in 1978. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1985 under the supervision of Ellen F. Prince.
Ward joined San Diego State University’s Department of Linguistics as a lecturer in 1985. In the following year, he joined Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991 and to Professor of Linguistics in 1997.
Ward chaired the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University from 1999 to 2004 and served as Co-Director of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN) from 2018 to 2024.
Ward has conducted research in the area of pragmatics, focusing on pragmatic theory, information structure, intonational meaning, and reference. He has focused on pragmatic meaning associated with particular syntactic constructions and intonational contours. His later research investigates demonstratives, event anaphora, functional compositionality, and the semantics-pragmatics boundary.
With Julia Hirschberg, Ward has researched the pragmatics of fall-rise intonation and introduced two conditions for its felicitous use. He found that the fall-rise intonational contour contributed pragmatically to the utterance interpretation by conveying speaker uncertainty. Also with Hirschberg, he has worked on a series of utterance pairs and investigated the effect of pitch range, duration, amplitude and spectral features, regarding the interpretation of rise-fall-rise intonational contour. Their study indicated pitch range as having a main effect on interpretation selection.
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