Thomas Shannon

Thomas F. Shannon, Professor of Germanic Linguistics, member of the Dutch Studies Program faculty, and former director of the UC exchange program in Germany, has been in our department since 1980. He holds Master’s degrees in German (SUNY Albany) and Theoretical Linguistics (Indiana) and a Ph.D. in Germanic Linguistics (Indiana).

Shannon has taught and conducted research in the Netherlands at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen on a Fulbright grant and researched at the Institut für deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. Active professionally, he serves on MLA Executive Committees, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Germanic Linguistics, the Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis, and the Dutch journal Nederlandse Taalkunde (Dutch Linguistics), and was formerly Vice President of the Society for Germanic Philology.

His areas of specialization are modern German and Dutch, particularly syntax and phonology, and he has published widely on a variety of topics, including naturalness, syllable structure, complementation and control, ergative phenomena, passivization, perfect auxiliary selection, and word order. He is particularly interested in functional and cognitive approaches, e.g. the affects of various semantic, pragmatic, and processing factors on syntactic phenomena. Working from actual texts, he is presently studying several word order phenomena in Dutch and German, especially the ordering of elements in the middle field as well as historical change in West Germanic, including Afrikaans, Low German, and Yiddish.

Professor Shannon is a faculty member of and Graduate Advisor for the Germanic Linguistics Specialization composed of six upper division and thirteen graduate level courses. As such the Specialization imbues the Humanities with a scientific component; thus priority to the carefully rotated linguistics courses is given for achieving the essential competence in Germanic Linguistics.