Rate My Professor Laurel Stvan

Laurel Smith Stvan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and TESOL at The University of Texas at Arlington, where she has served since 2007. She earned a PhD in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 1998, with her dissertation titled "The Semantics and Pragmatics of Bare Singular NPs." Prior degrees include an MA from the University of Illinois at Chicago and BA and MA degrees from English departments, where she analyzed and wrote poetry. Stvan's administrative experience at UTA encompasses two years as curriculum coordinator, nine years as departmental graduate advisor, and eight years as department chair. She brings extensive teaching expertise to graduate and undergraduate students at universities in the United States and China in both formal and applied linguistics. She has been promoted to Full Professor, effective September 1, 2026.

Dr. Stvan specializes in pragmatics, semantics, and the structure of bare singular count nouns in English, including pragmatic interpretations of determiner presence or absence. Her corpus-based research investigates lexical semantics, focusing on polysemy in health discourse, brand name morphology such as the -ex suffix from the United States Patent and Trademark Office database, discourse markers, and diachronic patterns in sentence-initial shell nouns using the Corpus of Historical American English. She also studies speech acts in internet memes via social media data and advances digital humanities and pedagogies for linguistics and TESOL. Current projects feature the Corpus of American Discourses on Health (CADOH) and data analysis from British and American campuses to help second language learners master the English article system. Key publications include "Semantic Incorporation as an Account for some Bare Singular Count Noun Uses in English" (Lingua, 2009), "Stress management: Corpus-based insights into vernacular interpretations of stress" (Communication & Medicine, 2013), "The Functional Range of Bare Singular Count Nouns in English" (book chapter, 2007), "The Contingent Meaning of -ex Brand Names in English" (Corpora, 2006), "Voiceovers and Do-overs: Increasing Our Chances to Connect" (The Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching, 2021), and "Who builds it, who benefits? Deepening student and faculty knowledge about Wikipedia’s scholarly value" (book chapter, 2023). She has authored numerous book reviews and supervised doctoral dissertations.