Interim Director of Graduate Studies Fr Linguistics (FA24)
Assistant Professor, French and Italian
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Linguistics
My research focuses on language variation and change, with a greater focus on the phonetics and phonology of Laurentian French (also called Canadian French, Quebec French, or Québécois). I’m especially interested in examining what variation teaches us about linguistic systems and how they interact with each other – for example, whether variability in one aspect of pronunciation can predict variability in others. To do this, I use a combination of corpus and experimental approaches, leveraging advances in both statistical techniques and computational tools.
My approach is to draw on cross-dialectal and cross-linguistic perspectives to the question of language variation and change, while considering the theoretical insights we can gain from that variation. Although my work primarily focuses on phonetics and phonology directly in spoken language, recent studies also investigate what variation in “casual writing” (e.g. informal Tweets) can tell us about language more broadly, and I both work on (e.g. Irish consonant mutation) and collaborate on (e.g. Dimasa differential object marking) work outside of French and not focusing on phonetics and phonology.
I lead the Patterns and Trends in Sociolinguistic Norms research lab, in which members investigate issues such as the structure of linguistic variation, the emergence of new linguistic forms, the theoretical or formal insights offered by language variation. While this work is often within the areas of phonetics, phonology and prosody, research by me and other members has also tackled topics like morphosyntactic variation, cognitive factors in language variation, and sociolinguistic attitudes.
I’m additionally the Secretary of the Canadian Linguistics Association (Association canadienne de linguistique). If wishing to reach out to me in that capacity, please contact me through sec@cla-acl.ca.
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