Graduate Students – Page 3 – Sociolinguistics Lab

Monica Nesbitt nominated for BFSAA Emerging Leader award

April 11, 2019

PhD Linguistics student Monica Nesbitt was one of five MSU graduate students nominated for a 2019 Emerging Leader award by the University’s chapter of the Black Faculty, Staff and Administrators Association (BFSAA). At an event on April 8, Monica was recognized for her peer mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students in the Linguistics program. Monica has been a manager of the Sociolinguistics Lab, has supervised many undergraduate transcribers and researcherse, and is currently a Graduate School Writing Fellow who convenes weekly writing/accountability meetings in the lab. It was a moving ceremony that also recognized the decades-long contributions of five Black faculty, staff and adminstrators, some of whom had first joined the University as students at time when there were very few Black faces on campus.

MSU people in the new Penn Working Papers

October 10, 2018

In time for NWAV 47, the selected papers from NWAV 46 have just been released. Edited by Jordan Kodner and Lacey Wade, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 24.2: Selected Papers from NWAV 46 includes articles by MSU researchers Monica Nesbitt, Suzanne Evans Wagner and Sayako Uehara:

Nesbitt, Monica. Economic change and the decline of raised TRAP in Lansing, MI.
Uehara, Sayako and Suzanne Evans Wagner. Progressive outliers in listener perception of sound change.

Both papers explore the sound change in progress we’re observing in Michigan from the Northern Cities Shift to a new vowel system that has various names in the literature, including the Elsewhere Shift, the Low Back Merger Shift and the Third Dialect.

Conferences / Faculty / Graduate Students

Congratulations to NWAV 47 Presenters!

September 27, 2018

The Sociolinguistics lab will be sending many projects to the 47th Annual NWAV Conference at New York University in New York City from October 18-21, 2018, including several talks! Congratulations to Silvina Bongiovanni, Monica Nesbitt, Matt Savage, and Alex Mason for getting accepted!

There will be practice talks in the weeks leading up to the conference, and all are invited to attend lab meetings to learn more and/or provide feedback!

Please see the Sociolinguistics lab calendar for specific dates of each practice talk!

TRAP: The loss of tensing in Michigan (Monica Nesbitt)
Style & attitude: The social evaluation of the BET vowel (Matt Savage & Alex Mason)
On the relationship between vowel nasalization and nasal weakening: Evidence from a Caribbean and non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish (Silvina Bongiovanni)
It’s a TRAP!: The trigger for the Elsewhere Shift in Lansing, Michigan (Alex Mason)
Attitudes toward TRAP in Michigan (Monica Nesbitt)
“It’s an American Symbol!”: Non-native speakers’ take on remarkable LIKE (Irina Zaykovskaya) – Practice Talk: October 5, 2018; Wells Hall B243; 12:30pm-3:00pm via Skype

Graduate Students / People

Dr Mingzhe Zheng!

December 20, 2017

Congratulations to Mingzhe Zheng, who on November 21, 2017 successfully defended his doctoral dissertation You have to learn to adapt: A sociolinguistic study of the “Asian City” of southeast Michigan. Dr Zheng is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Chinese at Earlham College, Indiana.

Graduate Students / People

Monica Nesbitt strong candidate for LSA travel award

December 15, 2017

Monica Nesbitt, PhD candidate in Linguistics, was shortlisted for a travel award to the Linguistic Society of America annual meeting in Salt Lake City, January 2018. Awards are granted by the LSA’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics (CEDL).

In a recent news announcement, the committee named five student recipients of the awards. Monica received an “honorable mention” for what the committee called her “high caliber application”. Congratulations, Monica, and good luck with your application next year!