Ruth Lanouette, associate professor of German, is a teacher and scholar of and about language who offers courses in both the German department and in the linguistics program, which she directs.
Speaking of the goals of modern language instruction, she says, "We want our students, after three terms of study, to be able to use the language appropriately, to be able to get around in a country where the language is spoken, and to be able to talk about themselves and ask others questions."
The linguistics program, which brings together faculty members from several departments -- classics, East Asian languages and cultures, German, philosophy, and psychology -- provides both a major and a minor in linguistics, the theoretical study of human communication.
A member of the Lawrence faculty since 1992, Lanouette earned her doctorate in German linguistics at Princeton University. In addition to teaching in Freshman Studies and at various levels of the German language sequence, as well as in the area of medieval German literature, she also teaches Introduction to Language, Historical Linguistics,The English Language in the linguistics program. She has served as chair of both the German department and the interdepartmental Foreign Language Coalition and is the on-campus advisor for students undertaking off-campus programs in Berlin and Freiburg, Germany.
Her research interests focus on the history of the noun phrase in German; two recent papers dealt with the position of the attributive genitive in various stages of German, and she contributed a review of Merkmale und Relationen: Diachrone Studien zur Nominalphrase des Deutschen, to the Spring 2002 issue of the journal Diachronica.
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