How does social meaning interact with language change?
I’m a PhD student and graduate assistant in Michigan State University’s Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures where I concentrate in sociolinguistics. I work with Betsy Sneller, Suzanne Evans Wagner, Karthik Durvasula, and others to investigate questions related to sociophonetics/phonology, language change, and the linguistic construction of identity. I am highly involved in the MI Diaries project, a large-scale project conducted by the MSU Sociolinguistics Lab that has been remotely gathering acoustic data (through participant self-recording) from hundreds of Michiganders since early 2020.
I am especially interested in finding ways to marry concepts from third-wave sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and sociocultural linguistics with experimental and mixed-methods approaches to address the fundamental questions of language change as laid out by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968):
(…) a model of language which accommodates the facts of variable usage and its social and stylistic determinants not only leads to more adequate descriptions of linguistic competence, but also naturally yields a theory of language change that bypasses the fruitless paradoxes with which historical linguistics has been struggling for over half a century (p. 99).
Specifically, I strive to investigate the degree and nature of interaction between the dynamics of language change and socioindexical meaning. I am additionally invested in exploring the extent to which these concepts can be integrated within a framework of cultural evolution to offer holistic explanations of the actuation and spread of linguistic change.
Currently, I am working on two bigger projects: conducting research for my second qualifying paper, and redrafting my first qualifying paper into a journal submission. In that first qualifying paper, I examined in detail the way an early-adolescent female Michigander speaker used two phonological variables involved in sound change (LOT/pre-oral TRAP and modal vs. creaky voice) to perform different age-related stances (child vs. teenager stances). I found that while modal vs. creaky voice was used to do this kind of stancetaking, variable LOT/pre-oral TRAP was not. This leads me to the claim that the overall indexical fields in which variants sit really matter – that in order for a variant to be used in this kind of stancetaking, its indexical field must contain certain specific, sociodemographically relevant meanings.