portrait of professor margaret thomas


I teach linguistics at Boston College, within a Department of Eastern, Slavic, and German Studies.  Most of my research is in either the history of linguistics, especially American linguistics, or second language acquisition.  Some of my work spans both these fields.  I also have a long-standing interest in the methodology of linguistics, that is, in the tools and techniques which linguists have used to study language.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses across a wide range of topics, including language typology, linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, the history of linguistics, and the structure of Japanese and of English.