Semantics John I. Saeed

I have an interest in linguistic interfaces, in particular in the relation between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic processes. A particular interest has been information structure, which has led me to investigate constituent order, focus and topic in a range of languages, but in most detail in Somali and related Cushitic languages, and more recently, Irish Sign Language. A related interest is the role of indexical expression like determiners and adverbials in context shifts. I have always been engaged in language description and documentation, and have written grammatical descriptions of Somali and Irish Sign Language.

Selected Publications

• Irish Sign Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. [Lorraine Leeson and John I. Saeed]
• ‘Word Order’ in Roland Pfau, Roland Pfau and Bencie Woll (eds.) Sign Language: An International Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012. [Lorraine Leeson and John I. Saeed]
• ‘A pragmatic account of the remote definite article in Somali, ’ in M. Frascarelli (ed.) A Country Called Somali: culture, language and society of a vanishing state. Turin: Harmattan Italia, 2011, pp. 59 – 84.
• ‘Pragmatics and semantics, ’ in Wolfram Bublitz and Neal Norrick (eds.) Handbooks of Pragmatics. Volume 1: Foundations of Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 461-90.
• ‘The procedure of marking contrast with alternatives: a constraint in the derivation of higher level explicatures, ’ in Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti and Aoife Ahern (eds.), Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives. Biggleswade, UK and New Milford, CT, USA, Emerald Books, 2011, pp. 293-316. [Susana Olmos, Laura Innocenti and John I. Saeed]
• Semantics. Third revised edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
• ‘Conceptual Blending and the Windowing of Attention in Irish Sign Language, ’ in M. Vermeerbergen, L. Leeson and O. Crasborn (eds.), Simultaneity in Signed Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 55 – 72. [Lorraine Leeson and John I. Saeed]
  
• ‘Somali morphology’ in A. S. Kaye (ed.) Morphologies of Asia and Africa. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2007, pp. 547-86.
  
• Somali. The London Oriental and African Language Library. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Somali Reference Grammar. Second Revised Edition. Kensington, Maryland: Dunwoody Press, 1993.

Teaching/Supervision

Currently my main teaching is on the MPhil programmes in CLCS, where I teach modules in semantics and pragmatics. I have also taught grammatical theory, semantics and linguistic typology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I have supervised doctoral theses in various areas of discourse studies, pragmatics, metaphor, and syntax; and on languages including English, Old English, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Irish Sign Language.

Contact Details

Centre for Language and Communication Studies