Prof. Betsy Sneller (MSU) and PhD candidate Daniel Greeson (Stony Brook University)’s paper “Distinct Phonological Reanalysis Patterns in Michigan English TRAP” was recently published in Proceedings of the 48th Annual Penn Linguistics Conference. The article is available on UPenn’s repository.
Congratulations, Betsy and Daniel!
This July, Emily Duggan (MA Linguistics 2025) successfully defended her thesis “Lesbian vs. Dyke: An examination of the differences in social meaning between two queer identity terms”. Emily was advised by Prof. Suzanne Wagner, and her committee included Suzanne, Betsy Sneller, and Karthik Durvasula.
The thesis is currently available on ProQuest and will later become available on the MSU Library’s thesis archive.
Congratulations, Emily!
Lab member Jess Shepherd (Linguistics PhD) recently had a paper published in the Journal of English Linguistics. The paper is titled “LTH Affrication: A sociolinguistic indicator in the American West” and is authored by Joey Stanley (Brigham Young University) and Jess Shepherd.
Congratulations, Jess!
The following people from the Sociolinguistics Lab will be presenting at NWAV 52 this year:
Adam’s work and the study by Jess, Betsy, and Drake all use speech data from the MI Diaries project.
We’ll also be looking out for presentations by the former MSU people shown in bold below:
See you in Miami!
In the last two years, we’ve welcomed two waves of new sociolinguistics-oriented graduate students into the Sociolinguistics Lab.
In fall 2023, Emily Duggan and Kate Speak began their Masters degrees in Linguistics. Kate has left to pursue a career in secondary education, while Emily is now in her second year and is preparing a masters thesis proposal on the socioindexical meanings of two identity labels, lesbian and dyke. Emily has also participated in the MI Diaries project, most recently as a regular chair of our weekly all-team meetings. Last spring, Emily was a key member of our cross-lab reading group on game theoretic semantics and sociolinguistic meaning.
Also in Fall 2023 we welcomed PhD Linguistics students Jessica Shepherd and Annan Kirk. Jessica completed a Bachelor’s degree in Linguistics at Brigham Young University. She is really interested in phonological variation between speakers and she’s currently working on a project that investigates sound change in Michigan English. Annan has an MA degree in Linguistics from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She’s interested in language and gender and in grammatical variation. She’s currently looking at adjectival intensifiers in Michigan English. Both Jessica and Annan have been graduate research assistants on the MI Diaries project.
Fall 2024 brought two new students to the lab: Hamlin Teng and Connor Bechler. Hamlin holds a masters degree in Sociology from Zhejiang University in China. He’s interested in statistical modeling of sociolinguistic variation and change. Currently Hamlin is conducting some research for the MI Diaries project on the demographics and submission patterns of its participants. Connor has a Masters degree in Linguistics from the University of Kentucky. Connor is interested in the phonetics/phonology interface, language change, and developing computational tools for under-resourced languages. He’s currently the Sociolinguistics Lab RA and a research assistant on the MI Diaries project.