Mary Catherine O’Connor

Professor of Education
AB, Stanford University; MA, PhD, University of California, Berkeley

Dr. O’Connor’s research and teaching interests are in linguistics and applied linguistics. One strand of her research centers on language description and documentation, including work on Northern Pomo, an extinct language of Northern California, and Medumba, a Grassfields language of Cameroon. Another strand in linguistics focuses on the interfaces of pragmatics, lexical semantics, and morphosyntax. A recent example involves a cross-linguistic study of the morphosyntax and pragmatics of complex noun phrases with a focus on possessive alternations. Within applied linguistics, her work centers on classroom discourse, and the role of language in standardized assessments, in literacy development and in mathematics learning. She has published books, journal articles, and book chapters in these three strands of work, and has received research funding from three directorates of the National Science Foundation (SBE, HER, and CISE). In addition to her teaching in the Literacy & Language specialization, Dr. O’Connor is also director of the Program in Applied Linguistics in the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, and teaches in the Linguistics Program there.