Professor Cummings is responsible for the design and delivery of undergraduate modules in Linguistics (LING 204 Communication Disorders; LING 211 Semantics; LING 301 Clinical Pragmatics; LING 308 Clinical Linguistics; LING 309 Pragmatics). She also teaches with other colleagues on two further modules (LING 101 Introduction to Language and Linguistics; LING 102 Exploring English Language).
Professor Cummings is a fully qualified speech and language therapist who is available for consultation work in the area of communication disorders.
Professor Cummings is a member of the Strategy in Communication (SINC) research group
Teaching and research interests overlap in the following areas.
Pragmatics and reasoning
It is still true today that the greatest explanatory challenges for cognitive theorists lie, not in understanding how deliberate, conscious reasoning proceeds, but in explaining the reasoning processes that are involved in a range of more mundane activities. These activities are performed effortlessly and include, most notably, utterance interpretation. As the study of this interpretation, pragmatics has the potential to contribute important insights to questions about the nature of mundane reasoning processes. The fact that this potential has been largely unexplored to date is an issue that is redressed in her research on pragmatics and reasoning.
Scientific reasoning
Scientists are routinely compelled to reason about problems in the absence of knowledge and evidence. This reasoning proceeds by means of heuristics (strategies) that are pragmatic and presumptive in nature. In this area of her research, the role of so-called informal fallacies in the initial stage of scientific inquiries into BSE and AIDS is examined. This stage of inquiry is noteworthy on account of its marked evidential bereftness and the urgency with which questions must be addressed. Quite apart from being fallacious, informal fallacies, it emerges, confer numerous epistemic benefits upon the inquiries of which they are a part.
Communication disorders
The Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists estimates that 2.5 million people in the UK have a communication disorder. Of this number, some 800,000 people have a disorder that is so severe that it is hard for anyone outside their immediate families to understand them. Professor Cummings teaches and researches the various developmental and acquired communication disorders that constitute these large and growing figures. She considers the epidemiology and aetiology of these disorders, their clinical presentation and how they are assessed and treated by clinicians.
Professor Cummings is happy to supervise research students who are interested in the following areas:
- Communication disorders (particularly pragmatic disorders)
- Linguistic pragmatics (particularly philosophical and clinical aspects)
- Argumentation and reasoning and fallacies (particularly as applied to public health).
Further information may be obtained from the NTU Graduate School.
Selected publications
- Clinical Linguistics. Cummings L, 2008, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ISBN: 9780748620760
- Clinical Pragmatics. Cummings L, 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN: 9780521888455
- Rethinking the BSE Crisis: A Study of Scientific Reasoning under Uncertainty. Cummings L, 2010, Dordrecht: Springer, ISBN 9789048195039
- The Routledge Pragmatics Encyclopedia. Cummings L, 2010, London and New York: Routledge, ISBN: 9780415430968
For full list click 'Go to Louise Cummings' publications' link above.
Professor Cummings can offer comment on communication disorders; public health (scientific reasoning specifically); and speech and language therapy.
