Laurel Stvan

Laurel Smith Stvan has graduate and undergraduate teaching expertise at US and Chinese universities. Her administrative experience includes two years as curriculum coordinator and nine years as departmental graduate adviser. She is currently serving her second term as department chair.

Dr. Stvan’s research strengths are in pragmatics, semantics, and the structure of bare singular count nouns; corpus-based work on lexical semantics, especially the interpretation of polysemy in health discourse, brand name morphology, and discourse markers; digital humanities and digital pedagogies for linguistics, and TESOL. Two current projects unite these themes: a) the compilation of a corpus of vernacular health discussions: CADOH (Corpus of American Discourses on Health) and b) a project analyzing data from students on British and American campuses to explore how second language learners might more easily master the English article system.