J. Michael Terry's Homepage

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Research

My work focuses on the semantics of tense and aspect in dialects of American English, with a particular emphasis
on African American English. Though difficult to define tense and aspect are, roughly speaking, natural language’s
primary mechanisms for expressing temporal relations – i.e. notions such as past and present, progressive and completed.
Among the current research projects I am involved in are studies of the formal semantic properties of African American
English perfect constructions, and of the possible effects of dialectal differences on the results of tests of mathematical
reasoning in early education.

Teaching

Among the courses that I teach regularly are Formal Perspectives on African-American English (Ling 310),
Semantic Theory I (Ling 537), and The Language of Time (Ling 539).

A Statement of my teaching philosophy can be found here
The complete list of courses offered in Linguistics (including course descriptions) can be found here

Downloadable Publications

My 2004 UMass Dissertation, On The Articulation of Aspect in African American English.
A Present Perfect Puzzle for African American English, presented as an invited talk at NELS 36. Revised version available
in the conference proceedings.
Expressive and Receptive Language Effects of African American English on a Sentence Imitation Task, with S.C. Jackson,
E. Evangelou, and R.L. Smith. Revised version to appear in Topics in Language Disorders.
Variable Dialect Switching Among African American Children: Inferences About Working Memory, with R. Hendrick,
E. Evangelou, and R.L. Smith. Revised version to appear in Lingua.

CV

A copy of my CV can be downloaded here.