John Saeed

Professor of Linguistics and
Head of School

Research Interests

I have an interest in linguistic interfaces, in particular in the relation between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic processes.  A particular interest has been information structure, which has led me to investigate constituent order, focus and topic in a range of languages, but in most detail in Somali and related Cushitic languages, and more recently, Irish Sign Language. A related interest is the role of indexical expression like determiners and adverbials in context shifts. I have always been engaged in language description and documentation, and have written grammatical descriptions of Somali and Irish Sign Language.

Selected Publications

• Irish Sign Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012. [Lorraine Leeson and John I. Saeed]
• ‘Word Order’ in Roland Pfau, Roland Pfau and Bencie Woll (eds.) Sign Language: An International Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2012. [Lorraine Leeson and John I. Saeed]
• ‘A pragmatic account of the remote definite article in Somali,’ in M. Frascarelli (ed.) A Country Called Somali: culture, language and society of a vanishing state. Turin: Harmattan Italia, 2011, pp. 59 – 84.
• ‘Pragmatics and semantics,’ in Wolfram Bublitz and Neal Norrick (eds.) Handbooks of Pragmatics. Volume 1: Foundations of Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2011, pp. 461-90.
• ‘The procedure of marking contrast with alternatives: a constraint in the derivation of higher level explicatures,’ in Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti and Aoife Ahern (eds.), Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives. Biggleswade, UK and New Milford, CT, USA, Emerald Books, 2011, pp. 293-316. [Susana Olmos, Laura Innocenti and John I. Saeed]
• Semantics. Third revised edition.  Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.
• ‘Conceptual Blending and the Windowing of Attention in Irish Sign Language,’ in M. Vermeerbergen, L. Leeson and O. Crasborn (eds.), Simultaneity in Signed Languages.  Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007, pp. 55 – 72. [Lorraine Leeson and John I. Saeed]
  
• ‘Somali morphology’ in A. S. Kaye (ed.) Morphologies of Asia and Africa. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2007, pp. 547-86.
  
• Somali.  The London Oriental and African Language Library. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999.
• Somali Reference Grammar.  Second Revised Edition.  Kensington, Maryland:  Dunwoody Press, 1993.

Teaching/Supervision

Currently my main teaching is on the MPhil programmes in CLCS, where I teach modules in semantics and pragmatics. I have also taught grammatical theory, semantics and linguistic typology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. I have supervised doctoral theses in various areas of discourse studies, pragmatics, metaphor, and syntax; and on languages including English, Old English, Irish, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Irish Sign Language.

John Saeed on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Centre for Language and Communication Studies
Room 4092 Arts Building
Trinity College
Dublin 2.

Telephone: +353 1 896 1505
Fax: +353 1 896 2941
Email: jsaeed@tcd.ie