Faculty – Page 3 – Sociolinguistics Lab

MSU represented at NWAV 49

October 18, 2021

For the first time, the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference is being held online. Hosted by the University of Texas at Austin, NWAV 49 talks are available as pre-recorded videos to registered participants, and live Q&A sessions are happening this week, October 19 – 24, 2021.

MSU will, as always, be pretty well represented! Here’s the list of current and former MSU faculty and students who will be presenting this year:

Adam Barnhardt. I didn’t go to college with anyone that country: Age-stratified indexicality of Southern-shifted vowels.
Jack Rechsteiner and Betsy Sneller. Non-binary speakers’ use of (ING) across gender-related topics.
Denise Troutman. Throwing shade: Signifyin(g) and synchronic change among Ebonics speakers.
Mingzhe Zheng. One-ge person or One-wei person: Exploring the use of Mandarin classifier across time.
Dennis Preston. Women are hens: A taxonomic exercise in historical gender-based metaphor.
Rebecca Roeder. PALM and the low-back merger shift: Evidence from Victoria, BC.
Marisa Brook. Language shift in a microcosm: Finnish-English bilingualism, contact, and substrate effects in Sointula, British Columbia.

Faculty / People

MSU Today features Suzanne Wagner

June 10, 2020

Sociolinguistics Lab co-director Suzanne Evans Wagner was featured in Michigan State University’s main news publication, MSU Today, at the end of May.

The story, “Understanding the language of change through linguistics” is an introductory overview of what sociolinguistics is, how Dr. Wagner came to join the field, and a little bit about some of the work we’ve done in the lab on sound change in Michigan. The short video captures only a tiny part of the bigger picture, but the main takeaway is that sociolinguists seek to understand how speakers use language to reflect and construct their identities, and that these actions contribute to language change over time.

The story is also on the College of Arts and Letters website, but this time with some great photos of members of the Sociolinguistics Lab! Below, you can see Dr. Irina Zaykovskaya with Suzanne.

Irina Zaykovskaya and Suzanne Wagner in the Sociolinguistics Lab. Photo: MSU College of Arts & Letters.

Faculty / People

Lockdown lingo: Betsy Sneller featured in Daily Telegraph story

May 11, 2020

Source: https://lowellsfirstlook.com/top-10-things-to-do-while-on-coronacation/

Incoming co-director of the lab, Dr. Betsy Sneller, was quoted in this story published May 11, 2020 in The Daily Telegraph, a Sydney-based Australian newspaper. Titled Do you know your lockdown lingo? Test yourself, the piece explores “coronavirus slang” like coronacation, covidiot and social distancing. But why should the pandemic have introduced new words and phrases to the English language?

“Part of the reason for this is that people’s patterns of interactions change drastically and this changes language,” [Sneller] said. She pointed to previous social upheaval caused by wars, mass migrations, disasters and plagues that also made a mark on our language. “The Dutch had a history of ‘pox’-related insults thought to date back to the Black Death.”

Faculty / People / Research

Welcome to Betsy Sneller!

April 7, 2020

The Linguistics program at Michigan State University has hired a new Assistant Professor of sociolinguistics, Dr. Betsy Sneller. Welcome, Betsy!

Betsy’s research seeks to understand the mechanisms of language variation and language change. She’s especially interested in children’s acquisition of phonological variation, including its sociolinguistic patterns, and more generally in how individuals mentally represent and reproduce phonological changes occurring in their speech communities. Her work has employed an unusually broad range of methods, from ethnography to experiments to computational modeling. She has published multiple times in Language Variation and Change, as well as in Language Dynamics and Change and Cognition.

Betsy Sneller

Betsy received her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018. Her primary advisor was William Labov, and her committee members included Meredith Tamminga and Josef Fruehwald. During her time at Penn, Betsy also collaborated and co-published with Gareth Roberts and Charles Yang, among others. For the last two years, Betsy has been a post-doctoral scholar in Elissa Newport‘s Learning and Development Lab at Georgetown University. She will join Michigan State University in August 2020.

A native of Holland, MI, Betsy is looking forward to collecting and analyzing speech data in her home state. Her MA thesis (2012, University of Essex), was titled “Aw man! The effect of hometown affiliation on NCS shifting in Holland, Michigan”. Betsy then carried out ethnographic, corpus and experimental research in Philadelphia. Some of the publications resulting from this effort include “Phonological rule spreading across hostile lines” (just published in Language Variation and Change) and “Competing systems in Philadelphia phonology” (also in LVC, with William Labov and other co-authors). With Gareth Roberts, Betsy has conducted artificial language learning experiments to test sociolinguistic predictions (“Why some behaviors spread while others don’t“), and she has continued to use this paradigm with children in her Georgetown-based research.

We look forward to welcoming Betsy to the Sociolinguistics Lab later this year!

Faculty / Graduate Students / Publications

Chapter on Lansing sound change in Low Back Merger Shift book

February 29, 2020

Some of the lab’s ongoing research into sound change in the Lansing area has been published as a chapter in The Low Back Merger Shift: Uniting the Canadian Vowel Shift, the California Vowel Shift, and Short Front Vowel Shifts across North America, edited by Kara Becker. Our chapter is titled “A tale of two shifts: Movement toward the Low Back Merger Shift in Lansing, Michigan“, and it’s authored by Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Alexander Mason. We provide a preliminary sketch of the advance of the Low Back Merger Shift (what we have previously called the ‘Elsewhere Shift’ in other work) among Lansing speakers born in the 1900s through the 1990s.