Rate My Professor Laurel Stvan

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.