Research

I'm a sociolinguist who studies how language varies and changes. There are three aspects of this that I focus on:

Sociolinguistics of place: How language varies and interacts with place. Broadly speaking, I am interested in how place is constructed. There are two senses to this. The first concerns how a place is developed as the result of a series of planning and policy decisions, while the second sense of how place is constructed concerns how locals’ sense of place and identity with a place is socially constructed.  Because planning and policy decisions play a key role in shaping communities and contributing to furthering or mitigating inequalities, I am keenly interested in theorizing what linguistic variation would look like in a ‘just’ or ‘good’ city. My work in this area tends to be sociophonetic, although I'm happy to look at morphosyntactic variables and use qualitative methods as well.

How variation relates to linguistic structure: One important question about language variation is at what level of the grammar a speaker selects a particular variant. In this sense, I'm interested in using variation data to inform and drive the analysis of both phonological and morphosyntactic structure. With respect to phonology, the direction, linguistic constraints on, and outcome of sound change can inform our understanding of phonological features, chain shifts and mergers, and other phonological processes. With respect to morphosyntactic structure, the attested variants and factors influencing variation can constrain the set of possible grammars that generate a given construction.

Sociolinguistics of popular culture: Like any other speech context, language use in popular culture can index a wide range of social categories. Unlike other speech contexts, however, this is an artificial context in many respects—editable, re-takeable, and intentionally written. Understanding variation in this context can shed light on how processes of indexicality and enregisterment work, as well as how speaker authenticity is constructed, performed, and interpreted by listeners. Much of my work in this area concerns the indexical meanings associated with musical genre and how linguistic production targeting these indexicalities by an artist may contribute to the perception of them as an authentic performer of that genre.