Karen
L. Adams, Ph.D.
Department
of English
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I
am currently a Professor of English/Linguistics at Arizona State University, where I co-direct the
Ph.D. concentration in Rhetoric/Composition/ Linguistics. I am a member of the
Program for Southeast Asian
Studies and affiliated faculty in the Women’s Studies Program.
In
1990, as part of my interest in language planning and language rights, I
co-edited the volume, Perspectives on Official English, which was
nominated for the MLA’s 1990 Kenneth W. Mildenberger Prize. I have continued to
give papers and publish on this topic both for an academic audience and for the
general public and am working with faculty in the
I
have a long-term interest in the linguistic construction of opposition. Among
my publications in this area are my 1999, “Deliberate Dispute and the
Construction of Oppositional Stance”, my 1997 co-authored “Gang Graffiti as a
Discourse Genre” and an article for Language Sciences, on “Creating ‘To
the Contrary Selves’” which looks at the contentious discourse strategies used
by the panelists and moderator in the PBS all-female news talk show.
I
am currently working on a volume on televised political debates. My graduate
level courses include pragmatics and discourse analysis, cross-cultural
discourse studies and language and gender. All these courses have been
developed within the theoretical framework of Critical Discourse Analysis.
I also have done historical comparative work on
Austroasiatic languages, specifically their numeral classification systems and
have numerous publications in the area. I directed the Program for Southeast
Asian Studies at ASU in 1998-1999, and 2001-2002.