Linguistics Faculty
Carol Myers-Scotton
DEGREE: Ph.D., University of Wisconsin
POSITION: Adjunct Professor of Linguistics
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EMAIL: myerssc3@msu.edu
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Carol Myers-Scotton retired in 2003 from the University of South Carolina where she was a Carolina Distinguished Professor. She is now affiliated with Michigan State University where she is an adjunct professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages. She is also a visiting scholar at the MSU African Studies Center. She received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Wisconsin in 1967. She also holds a MA in English from UW-Madison and a BA in political science from Grinnell College.
Myers-Scotton specializes in sociolinguistics (especially socio-pragmatics) and language contact, with special reference to the Bantu languages of Eastern and Southern Africa. She is best known for her studies on codeswitching, the use of two or more languages in the same conversation, but her most current research covers language contact phenomena in general (e.g., creole development, mixed languages, convergence across languages). Her Markedness Model deals with social motivations for codeswitching; her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model offers an explanation of the grammar of codeswitching within the same clause. In addition, the 4-M model of morpheme classification, developed with Janice L. Jake, applies to codeswitching but also linguistic phenomena in general. (For details, see Myers-Scotton, Contact Linguistics, 2002, as well as more recent articles listed in her vita on her web site).
Myers-Scotton is the author of three research monographs on codeswitching and language contact, all published by Oxford University Press, as well as several other books. Her most recent book (2006) is a textbook on bilingualism, Multiple Voices, An Introduction to Bilingualism (Blackwell). In addition, she is the author of a number of refereed articles and book chapters. She continues to present papers at national and international conferences.
Myers-Scotton has received a number of research grants, including two NSF awards. Her most recent NSF grant (2004-5) was for a study of grammatical aspects of language maintenance and shift in South Africa among Xhosa-English bilinguals.
