Dr. Reid (PhD Columbia) came to the Graduate School of Education in 1977 with a background in linguistics, and in teaching English in Togo (West Africa) and French at the elementary level.  His scholarly interest lies in the area of grammatical theory with an emphasis on English.  His approach to language is functional and semantic.  Reid sees the grammar of any language as governed by meaning rather than formal syntactic rules. For example, Reid (1991) treats both the plural -s (boys) and the third person -s (she leaves) as freely chosen meaning-bearing units.  The verb -s is chosen because its meaning independently contributes to the communication of the speaker’s message (just like the noun -s), not because of a syntactic rule of subject-verb agreement. Dr. Reid teaches a two-semester general linguistics course Foundation of Language I & II designed for students in the Second Language, Reading, and English Education programs, and English Structure and Phonology.

Title(s): Associate Professor

Education: Ph.D., Columbia University

Affiliations:

Research interests:

Functional grammatical theory and its applications.

Recent publications:

Reid. W. (under review). Columbia School and Saussure’s Langue.

Reid, W. (2004). Monosemy, Homonymy, and Polysemy.  In R. Kirsner, E. Contini-Morava and B. Rodriguez-Bachiller (Eds.) Cognitive and Communicative Approaches to Linguistic Analysis (pp. 93-129). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reid. W., R. Otheguy, N. Stern (Eds.). (2002) Signal, Meaning, and Message: Perspective on sign-based linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Reid, W. (1995).  Quantitative analysis in Columbia-School theory.  In E. Contini-Morava and B. Goldberg (Eds.). Meaning and Explanation.  Berlin: Mouton de Grayter.

Reid, W. (1991). Verb and Noun Number in English: A Functional Explanation.  New York: Longman