I liked "Arrival"

The sci-fi film Arrival recently opened, and because its main character is a linguist, Brice Russ at Science Magazine decided to get some linguists' perspectives on the film. Follow the link below to hear from David Adger (Queen Mary University of London), Nicholas Subtirelu (Georgetown) and me. 

For linguists, the new sci-fi film Arrival can't come soon enough

Is it a cinéma vérité portrayal of how linguists work in the field? No. Does the language learning (on both the human and alien sides) happen improbably fast? Yes.  But I really enjoyed this movie nonetheless!

Homecoming Lecture at Dartmouth College, 10/27

I'm very excited to give the Annual Linguistics Homecoming Lecture at my alma mater, Dartmouth College, later this week!

Talk details and abstract can be found here.

Dartmouth Hall

Fall 2016 Teaching

Enjoying that back-to-school feeling as I look forward to teaching two of my favorite courses! Course blurbs below; click each title for the syllabus.

LING 215: Sounds of Language (undergraduate) An introduction to phonetics and phonology, the linguistic subfields concerned with describing and explaining how speech sounds are made, used, heard, and mentally organized.

LING 481: Sociolinguistic Variation (graduate/undergraduate) Language varies: within speakers, across speakers, and over time. This course is a theoretical and practical introduction to variationist sociolinguistics, the subfield of linguistics concerned with understanding the relationship between variation and language change and with describing and accounting for variation in terms of the linguistic and social factors which underlie it. What are the objects of study in sociolinguistic research? What kinds of questions can we ask about the relationship between language and society, and how do we use quantitative methods to find their answers? We'll address these foundational issues, read classic and contemporary papers in the field (about old fishermen, Harlem teens, high school cliques, salespeople, frat guys, politicians, and other remarkable language users) and apply what we've learned to group and individual projects exploring particular cases of variation.

Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research

Awareness and Control in Sociolinguistic Research (Cambridge University Press) is now published and available for purchase! This book (edited by Anna Babel of The Ohio State University) has something for everyone, whether you're an experimentalist, a field interviewer, an ethnographer, a theorist, or some combination thereof. My chapter - Awareness and acquisition of new dialect features - addresses the extent to which awareness of a dialect feature is a prerequisite for change in that feature (spoiler: it's not).