My talk for the virtual NWAV49 (based on collaborative work with my student Yoojin Kang) is now online!
Chair of the new LSA Social Media Committee
The Linguistic Society of America has a new Social Media Committee, and I am the Chair of it. We’re less than a week past our Twitter Debut but so far it’s been a really smooth and fun experience working with this group. I’ve got some ideas I’m excited about implementing, too. Stay tuned on Twitter and Facebook (and to a lesser extent, LinkedIn)!
NSF Doctoral Dissertation Award: Yoojin Kang
Congratulations to my doctoral student Yoojin Kang, who has officially been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to support her dissertation research! Yoojin will study the production and perception of dialect features by two groups in South Korea: natives of Kyungsang province who have been living in Seoul, and natives of Seoul who have been living in Kyungsang.
Seoul is urban and its dialect is considered prestigious and "standard", while Kyungsang is more rural and its dialect is relatively stigmatized. So probably everybody from Kyungsang who moves to Seoul just abandons their home dialect for the standard while Seoul migrants to Kyungsang maintain their native variety, right? In fact, Yoojin's previous work has suggested more complex patterns of behavior depending on the specific dialect feature involved, the attitude of the speaker, and how these and other factors interact with more global notions of (non)standardness. Her dissertation will expand and broaden this work, significantly contributing to knowledge about how people vary and change their dialects as a result of mobility and new dialect input.
"English Phonetics" in the Handbook of English Linguistics
My chapter on English Phonetics now appears in the (e-book) 2nd edition of the Wiley Handbook of English Linguistics, edited by Bas Aarts, April McMahon and Lars Hinrichs. You can see a preview of the chapter in Google Books.
As I write in the introduction, “My goal in this chapter is to describe those phonetic features which are typically characteristic of English varieties, while also giving a sense of the phonetic diversity to be found within this language”, and I accordingly cite a lot of recent sociophonetics work. My hope is that this chapter is useful for students or anyone else who needs an intro to or refresher on English phonetics (perhaps because they are taking a course in Sociolinguistics or Applied Linguistics that assumes such knowledge).