Sarah Babinski
- corpus phonetics - sound change - typology - Australian languages -

I am a phonetician and historical linguist working on questions of phonetic typology, stress/prosody, and sound change. I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Language Evolution (ISLE) at the University of Zürich working on topics in phylolinguistics, including models of analogical change and population structure of phonetic data. 

I received my PhD from Yale University in 2022, with a dissertation titled "Archival Phonetics and Prosodic Typology in Sixteen Australian Languages." I have created word- and segment-level alignments for narrative recordings from 16 19 Australian languages from archival deposits in AIATSIS, ELAR, and PARADISEC. This phonetic corpus serves as the basis of much of my phonetic work, including a typology of stress marking in Australian languages, an investigation into the function of word-initial pitch, and studies of stress and prosody in individual languages. 

Creating a methodological pipeline for the processing of archival audio is essential to my corpus phonetic work. I have published on the use of forced alignment tools on under-resourced languages and on the usability of archival language materials for phonetic analysis. 

Through the typological study of variation, I aim to learn more about how phonetic features vary and change over time. With population structure tools such as Analysis of Molecular Variance, I have found that variation in stress marking has cross-linguistic structure. 

Research interests: 

• language change 

• typology & variation  

• corpus phonetics 

• computational methods 

• prosody (especially word-level) 

• analogy

• Australian language region