Associate Professor Lesley Stirling
Contact details
Phone +61 3 8344 5192
Email: lesleyfs@ unimelb.edu.au
Office: Arts Centre 529
Qualifications
BA(Hons) University of Queensland
PhD (Cognitive Science & Linguistics) University of Edinburgh
Biography
Lesley Stirling's undergraduate training in linguistics, semiotics and French at the University of Queensland was followed by postgraduate coursework in cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh. Lesley taught at the University of Edinburgh for three years, and simultaneously completed her PhD thesis with a typological and formal account of switch-reference and logophoricity in languages of Papua and North America: she was awarded the Crawford Medal in 1996 by the Australian Academy of the Humanities for this research. Lesley joined this department in 1989. She has many research interests and other major projects have included cross-disciplinary collaborative work with Professor Roger Wales on the relationship between prosody and syntactic structure in sentence processing and disambiguation, and with Professor Wales, Associate Professor Janet Fletcher, and Dr. Ilana Mushin, on dialogue structure and prosody. Anaphora, deixis, and referential choice has been another on-going research interest, and she contributed a monograph-length chapter on anaphora and deixis in English, jointly with Emeritus Professor Rodney Huddleston, to the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and continues to work on a survey of major approaches to anaphora within linguistics and cognitive science. Since the early 1990s she has also been working on Kala Lagaw Ya, the indigenous language of the Western Torres Strait islands, and in addition to topics in the grammar of this language has a broader interest in referential choice and typological discourse analysis in Australian languages. Most recently her research interests have coalesced around topics in discourse analysis, in particular narrative analysis, and specifically with respect to language disorders. An ARC funded project on autism and written narrative began in 2006. Other recent cross-disciplinary work with Professor Lenore Manderson is exploring linguistic indicators of perspective and identity in narratives of disease and disability.
Reserch fields and Areas of Supervision
Syntactic and semantic theory and analysis
Grammatical description and typology
Kala Lagaw Ya (the Western Torres Strait Islands language)
Formal and functional approaches to discourse analysis and representation
Narrative
Anaphora, dexis, perspective and referential choice
Referential choice and discourse analysis of Australian Languages
Psycholinguistics - Language processing and production
Autism and language
Schizophrenia and language
Historiography of linguistics
Language and gender
Topics in cognitive science
Selected Publications
Download Full Publications list [PDF] here.
Stirling, Lesley and Barrington, Graham. In press. "Then I'll huff and I'll puff or I'll go on the roff" thinks the wolf: Spontaneous narratives written by a child with autism"(Download PDF) To appear in: Schalley, Andrea C. & Khlentzos, Drew (eds) Mental states: Language and cognitive structure. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Manderson, Lenore & Stirling, Lesley. To appear, 2007. The absent breast: Speaking of the mastectomied body. Feminism and Psychology.
Stirling, Lesley. 2005. Switch-reference. In the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition. Elsevier Science.
Mushin, Ilana; Stirling, Lesley; Fletcher, Janet & Wales, Roger. 2003. Discourse structure, prosody and grounding in task-oriented dialogue. Discourse processes. 35.1: pp. 1-31
Fletcher, Janet; Stirling, Lesley; Mushin, Ilana, & Wales, Roger. 2002. Intonational rises and dialogue acts in the Australian English map task. Language and Speech. 45(3), 229-254. London: Kingston Press.
Stirling, Lesley & Huddleston, Rodney. 2002. Deixis and Anaphora. In The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, eds Rodney Huddleston and Geoff Pullum. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1449-1564.
Austin, Peter and Stirling, Lesley (eds.). 2001. Anaphora. Special Issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics.
Stirling, Lesley; Fletcher, Janet; Mushin, Ilana and Wales, Roger. 2001. 'Representational issues in annotation: using the Australian map task corpus to relate prosody and discourse structure'. Speech Communication, Special Issue on Speech Annotation and Corpus Tools. Vol. 33, pp. 113-34.
Stirling, Lesley. 1998. 'Isolated if-clauses in Australian English'. In The Clause in English, eds. D. Lee and P. Collins, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 275-297.
Stirling, Lesley F. 1997. Metonymy and anaphora. Belgian Journal of Linguistics: 10, pp. 69-88.
Stirling, Lesley F. and Wales, R. 1996. Does prosody support or direct sentence processing? Language and Cognitive Processes. (Special issue on Prosody and Parsing.) 11.1/2: pp. 193-212.
Stirling, Lesley F. 1993. Switch-reference and Discourse Representation. Studies in Linguistics Series, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 354 pp.
Stirling, Lesley F. 1987. Language and gender in Australian newspapers. In Women and Language in Australian and New Zealand Society, ed. A. F. Pauwels, Australian Professional Publications, Sydney: pp. 108 - 128.