Education

• PhD, Linguistics, University of Minnesota
  

Biography

After completing a B.A in Psychology, Dr. Hedberg received her Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of Minnesota, with a dissertation on Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English. Prior to taking up her appointment at SFU, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. She holds a joint appointment between Linguistics and Cognitive Science.

Her research interests lie in the interactions between prosody, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. She uses methods from corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, formal linguistics, and cognitive science to study the forms and meanings of linguistic constructions as they are produced and comprehended in context.

Dr. Hedberg is currently pursuing SSHRC-funded research on the analysis of oral discourse in the Coast Salish language Hul’q’umi’num’ in collaboration with Donna Gerdts. She also continues to study the prosodic meaning of questions, parentheticals and deaccenting in English; the syntactic form and discourse meanings of simple copular sentences and cleft sentences cross-linguistically; and the discourse meanings of forms of referring expressions cross-linguistically.

Read more about Dr. Hedberg's work in Cognitive Science.