My edited volume with Víctor Fernández-Mallat - "Dialect Contact: From Speaker to Community-Based Perspectives" - now exists in physical form! This was a really rewarding and fun collaboration, and we're proud of the final product: 10 chapters from us and 14 other contributors, representing a diverse set of languages and varieties spanning five continents. Available for order through Georgetown University Press, Barnes & Noble, Amazon etc. (academic friends, please ask your institutional library to order a copy!)
Sociophonetics in Brazil 🇧🇷
This August I went to Brazil! I gave an invited talk about my work on second dialect acquisition and vowels at the University of São Paulo, before heading to O Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem at the University of Campinas to work with Livia Oushiro's research group and teach a week-long mini course in Sociophonetics - some of the hybrid class participants are pictured below. The students at both USP and Unicamp were so friendly, thoughtful, engaged, and generally impressive - such a joy to talk to/work with them!
Sociophoneticians IRL and online
Corpora of Mobile Speakers has launched!
I’m happy to announce the “publication” of the Corpora of Mobile Speakers (CorMS)! So far CorMS consists of two corpora drawn from my own NSF project, the New Yorkers in Toronto Corpus and the Torontonians in New York Corpus, though my hope is that the number of corpora linked to the site will grow (from the work of my own students, or colleagues who also work on mobile speakers). The CorMS website contains information about the corpora and links to a more detailed user guide about how they were built and what they contain; to access the data files (which are currently stored in a Georgetown Box folder), potential users need only register for access via a google form linked on the CorMS site.
If you have any questions about CorMS, find me at ICLaVE in Vienna next month (where I’ll be giving a multimedia presentation about the corpora) or send me an email!
New paper in "Language and Communication"
I have a new article in Language & Communication w/Felipe de Jesus & Sarah Bellavance, in which we examine how a US expat in Toronto negotiates her New Yorker identity in conversation with 2 Canadians via epistemic stance-taking. You can download the article for free for 50 days via this link.
Paper Abstract:
This paper investigates knowledge management in interaction and the role of epistemic stance in place identity construction. We examine how a US expat in Toronto negotiates her New Yorker identity in conversation with two Canadians by demonstrating how authoritative epistemic stances are employed to produce relations of distinction, adequation, and authentication in service of place identity construction. We also discuss ‘epistemic disputes’, wherein epistemic stances and claims to place identity are challenged through the notion of epistemic rights. In doing so, we argue for the fundamental connection between information state, management of knowledge in interaction, and processes of identity construction.