Alice F. Freed

(Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, Montclair State University) received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her fields of expertise are Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis, and the Structure of American English. Her research focuses on language and gender, question use in English, institutional discourse (“talk at work”), and the language of food. While at Montclair State she taught both Linguistics and Women’s Studies. She has also taught as a visiting professor at the University of New Mexico (1995), at New York University (2001), and as part of Montclair’s Global Education Program at Beijing Jiaotong University (2010, 2011), at Shanghai University (2013), at Graz University of Technology (2014) and at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco (2017-present). She served as Chair of the Linguistics Department at Montclair State for seven years; was a member of the Linguistic Society of America’s Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics (COSWL) for three years; worked as a consultant in discourse analysis at AT&T Labs, Research Department (in NJ) and has served as an expert witness for legal issues that involve meaning and language use. Her books include The Semantics of English Aspectual Complementation (Reidel 1979), Rethinking Language and Gender Research: Theory and Practice (Longman 1996) and “Why Do You Ask?”: The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse (Oxford University Press, 2010). She has also published numerous chapters and articles in Linguistics collections and peer?reviewed journals.