Maura O'Leary

Semanticist, Syntactician, Field Researcher, Teacher, & Pedagogist

I am an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University.

I study the communication of temporal information: how do humans communicate about when things happen? My dissertation provides a formal model of nominal evaluation times, including nominal lexical aspect, interaction with a sentential tense operators, interactions with the evaluation times of nominal modifiers, and the dynamic effects of novelty on evaluation times.

I additionally do both morphosyntactic and revitalization work with the critically endangered Alaskan Dene (Athabaskan) language Hän.

Recently, I have also been working on equitable and inclusive pedagogical methods for teaching and evaluation in university-level linguistics courses.

Get in touch at Maura.O'Leary@wwu.edu.

Newsfeed

2024

September 2024: I started my first year as an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University.
June 2024: Proud Student Moment - UCLA student Mario Peng Lee (research assistant for several years on the the Diverse Names Generator) was featured on the on the UCLA Newsroom and the UCLA Humanities websites. Check out his mention of our project!
March 2024: Projects funded! Swarthmore students Joey Driscoll and Elijah Cavalier were each awarded $6000 in Academic Division Summer Funding from Swarthmore College. Joey will be working on making novel learning materials for the Hän Revitalization Project, and Elijah will be researching the syntax and semantics of tense in time travel science fiction works.
March 2024: I accepted a tenure track position at Western Washington University!
February-March 2024: Proud Student Moment - Bryn Mawr student Emma Ryan presented her work on False Belief Implicatures - a project which began in my Time in Language seminar in 2023 - at both the Texas Linguistics Society and the Penn Linguistics Conference! Check out her mention of the project in this feature profile on the Bryn Mawr website.

2023

November 2023: I was awarded the Swarthmore Faculty Research Support Grant in the amount of $3600 to work with Swarthmore research assistants on a morphological transducer that will provide data to aid in the creation of the next textbook for the Hän Revitalization Project.
May 2023: Rainey Williams, Mario Peng Lee, and I published our paper The Diverse Names Generator: An app for decreasing bias and promoting inclusion in the 2023 LSA Proceedings.
May 2023: I finished my first year teaching at Swarthmore!
April 2023: Invited talk at San Diego State University: EDI Benefits of Alternative Grading Systems in Undergraduate Linguistics Courses.
January 2023: I was runner-up for the Five-Minute Linguist competition at this year's LSA annual meeting. Watch my talk on Why you can never tell whether someone is currently a fugitive to learn a little bit about the temporal side of lexical semantics in a fun and engaging 5 minutes.
January 2023: Rainey Williams, Mario Peng Lee, and I presented our work on the Diverse Names Generator - our website and app that allow linguists to generate diverse names on the fly without bias - at the LSA annual meeting in Denver. I'm so proud of my RAs!

2022

December 2022: My RAs Rainey Williams and Mario Peng Lee were awarded Travel Grants from the UCLA Undergraduate Research Center for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences for our upcoming presentation at the LSA in January 2023.
November 2022: Both of my RAs - Rainey Williams and Mario Peng Lee - were awarded Undergraduate Research and Travel Awards by the UCLA Linguistics Department for our upcoming presentation at the LSA in January 2023.
November 2022: I was awarded the Swarthmore Faculty Research Support Grant in the amount of $1800 for work on the Hän Revitalization Project.
October 2022: My chapter SemanTasks and SemanTricks: Using Linguistic Knowledge to Your Advantage was accepted for publication in Games for Students of Linguistics.
September 2022: I have been selected to compete in the Five Minute Linguist Competition at the LSA annual meeting in January.
September 2022: My RAs - Rainey Williams and Mario Peng Lee - and I will be presenting our work on the Diverse Names Generator at the LSA in January.
September 2022: We have completed the First Annual Hän Language Camp! Three days of teaching and learning the Hän language in Eagle Village, AK, and we got to debut our Hän language learning materials: textbook, phrasebook, flashcards, and bingo cards. Pictures coming soon!
August 2022: I began my position as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, teaching Semantics and Introduction to Language and Linguistics.
June 2022: I got a grant from the UCLA Center for the Advancement of Teaching for the Diverse Names Generator project.
June 2022: I graduated with my doctorate from UCLA!
May 2022: My article Implementing Skills-Based Grading in a Linguistics Course (with Richard Stockwell) was published in this year's edition of Teaching American Speech.
May 2022: I have accepted a 3-year Visiting Assistant Professorship at Swarthmore College!
May 2022: I have filed my dissertation!
April 2022: UCLA Colloquium: It's About Time: A long-expected relationship between nouns and tense.
March 2022: My manuscript Implementing Skills-Based Grading in a Linguistics Course (with Richard Stockwell) was accepted for publication in this year's edition of Teaching American Speech.
March 2022: The UCLA Department of Linguistics has hired me to edit the materials for their course Ling 1: Introduction to the Study of Language for equitability and inclusivity.
March 2022: I presented a talk on Skills-Based Grading at the UCLA Center for Education Innovation & Learning in the Sciences' (CEILS) Journal Club for STEM Education Research
January 2022: I have accepted an offer to teach Semantics and Pragmatics at San Diego State University for the Spring 2022 term.

2021

December 9, 2021: I successfully defended my dissertation! See the defense handout here.
November 2021: Richard Stockwell and I submitted a manuscript Implementing Skills-Based Grading in a Linguistics Course for publication. Learn more about our work with Skills-Based-Grading here.
June 2021: I received a $2000 grant from Native Languages of the Americas for the Hän Revitalization Project.
May 2021: I presented a talk on the benefits of Skills-Based Grading at the first Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT) Workshop on Inclusive Teaching in Semantics.
April 2021: My paper Locality constraints in nominal evaluation times was published.
March 2021: The Hän Revitalization Project just celebrated our first printing! Check out our flashcards and phrasebook here.
March 2021: My paper Skills-Based Grading: A novel approach to teaching formal semantics (with Richard Stockwell) was published. Learn more about my pedagogical work here.
February 2021: Invited talk at the University of Oklahoma: Revitalizing a pronominal system. Slides available on this page.
February 2021: Invited talk at UCSD: Three Facets of Nominal Temporal Information. Handout available on this page.
January 2021: Two talks presented at the LSA: Locality constraints in nominal evaluation times & Skills-Based Grading: A novel approach to teaching formal semantics. Handouts, slides, and associated papers available on this page.

2020

December 2020: Invited talk at UC Berkeley - Hän Pronominal Prefixes. Slides available on this page.
November 2020: My pedagogy abstract on Skills-Based Grading (with Richard Stockwell) won the LSA's Student Abstract Award! Learn about our project here.

Dissertation

Nominal Evaluation Times

My dissertation, which provides a formal analysis that can predict the available nominal property times for any given noun in any given sentence.

Learn more