Diana ben-Aaron

Postdoctoral researcher VARIENG Research Unit Department of English University of Helsinki e-mail: my.name@iki.fi Full CV (Word document)

Education

Ph.D., English linguistics, University of Helsinki, 2005.

M.Sc., journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, 1993.

B.Sc., materials science and engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985.

B.Sc., humanities (science writing), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1985.

Research Interests

Political ritual and rhetoric, scale and distance effects in communications, organization of events, textual organization and the management of attention, intercultural aspects of translation, occupational socialization in language, sociolinguistic theory, outlyers and dialect contact effects.

Research Projects

Postdoctoral project

My postdoctoral project is an investigation of changes in speech of native English speaking migrants to other English speaking countries; in particular, I am interested in the implications of these changes for sociolinguistic theory, as style shifting or contact-induced dialect change. I am collecting examples of this kind of change, and am extremely interested in meeting people who may themselves manifest transnational contact-induced speech changes.

Dissertation project

My dissertation was a multidimensional analysis of newspaper stories about national holidays as an exercise of state power. A sampled run of 150 years of Fourth of July stories from The New York Times was examined in terms of the way these stories presented a cognitive structure of celebration events, evaluated the actual practices of celebrating, invoked metaphors of personhood and family, took different footings relative to the nation, and made claims to reader attention. The study made use of pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and systemic-functional linguistics, building them into a methodology for analyzing subject focused corpora. My abstract and defense announcement are online, and complete bound copies of the PhD (aka PIC Monographs 5) are available from me.

Recent Publications

Forthc. “The journalistic interview between narrativity and reality.” Jan-Ola Östman and Anna Solin (eds.), Responsibility in Discourse and the Discourse of Responsibility. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (2006).

2005. “Given and News: Evaluation in newspaper stories about national anniversaries.” TEXT 25-5: 691-718, special 25^th anniversary issue “Celebrating anniversaries: Marking accomplishments over time,” edited by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz.

2004. “What’s new and what leaps to the eye: reading for ‘interesting information’ and the narcissism of small differences.” Pragmatics, Ideology and Contacts Bulletin 7, Helsinki, December. 82-88.

2004. “Kansallispäivä diskurssina." In Terttu Nevalainen et al, Englannin aika: Elävän kielen kartoitusta. Helsinki: WSOY. 207-211.

2003. “When news isn't news: the case of national holidays." Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4:1. 75-102.

Recent Presentations

“In the middle of the Atlantic without a dialect map: when mobile English speakers restyle,” paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 16, Limerick, 6-8 July 2006.

“Alignment of event experiences in Appraisal: how the media judge national happenings,” philology research seminar presentation, University of Tampere Department of English, 22 March 2006.

“Election night in Finland: the construction of national politics as a face-to-face activity,” Symposium on Discourse, Media and Culture in honor of Gerda Lauerbach, J.W. Goethe-Universität Frankfurt-am-Main, 24 February 2006.

“Given and news: how news readers process information,” talk for business intelligence analysts at Novintel Oy, 10 February 2006.

Theory and Methodology in Media Language Research, chaired conference session at third conference of the Finnish Society for the Study of English (FINSSE 3), 18-20 August 2005, Jyväskylä.

Teaching Interests

I am interested in supervising students in research projects in the untidier, more social scientific areas of linguistics, such as discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, and in teaching all kinds of linguistics and support courses including pragmatics and discourse analysis, translation and academic writing.

Teaching Experience

2006-2007: courses at the Open University, Helsinki, under the aegis of the University of Helsinki Department of English: Structure of English I, Translation I (Fin-Eng), pronunciation, linguistics tutorial.

2005-2006: temporary lecturer at the University of Tampere, Department of English: two levels of Structure of English, linguistics (introductory survey course, semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis), options in discourse analysis and media discourse analysis, supervision of all BAs in linguistics.

Jan 2005-June 2005: temporary lecturer at the University of Helsinki, Department of English: freshman tutorial (linguistics and literature), academic writing, two levels of translation, intermediate option in discourse analysis, advanced option in media discourse analysis.

Jan 1998-Dec 2004: hourly paid teacher at the University of Helsinki, Department of English: two levels of translation to begin with, and latterly sociolinguistics proseminar for teachers, academic writing, freshman tutorial and discourse analysis option.

Other / non-academic

I’m also a freelance translator (licensed Finnish-English and Swedish-English) and business writer. In my spare time, I blog, go to ballet classes, and travel to see friends and family.