People – Page 8 – 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.

Rural fieldwork on display at MSU undergraduate conference UURAF

April 11, 2019

On April 5th, undergraduate sociolinguists Jared Kaczor and Travis Coppernoll presented their poster Football, Church and Free Breakfast: Doing Sociolinguistic Research in Rural Communities Around Lansing at the 2019 Michigan State University Undergraduate Research and Arts Forum (UURAF). The project, which has been running since August, focuses on two small communities in a rural part of mid-Michigan. Jared and Travis have been developing an ethnography via trips to football games, church coffee mornings and local cafés. They have just begun to record sociolinguistic interviews with residents. The goal of the project is to compare rural speech with the Sociolinguistics Lab’s existing corpus of urban speech.

Alumni / Events / People / Research

Welcoming back Rebecca Roeder

December 10, 2018

The Linguistics program‘s latest Colloquium speaker was Rebecca Roeder (UNC Charlotte). Roeder graduated with a PhD in Linguistics from MSU in 2006, under the direction of Dennis Preston. Her colloquium talk was titled “The role of PALM in the low back merger: Theory and evidence”. We were lucky to also get some time with Becky in the Sociolinguistics Lab, where we talked about the phonology and sociolinguistics of the Canadian Shift/Third Dialect Shift/Elsewhere Shift/etc, which Becky has been studying in the Canadian context, while we’ve been tracking it here in Michigan.

It was great to have Becky back at Michigan State!

Research / Undergraduates

Undergraduate research funding secured

October 30, 2018

Suzanne Wagner has received two awards of $1000 each from the College of Arts and Letters Undergraduate Research Initiative (CAL-URI). One of the awards will support undergraduate Linguistics majors Jared Kaczor and Travis Coppernoll, who are carrying out ethnographic and sociolinguistic fieldwork in two rural communities in the Lansing area. The other award will support Linguistics PhD student Matt Savage and his collaborators to design and implement a series of online language attitudes surveys. Matt’s team will include at least one undergraduate programmer.

Both projects support the lab’s ongoing investigation of sound change in the English vowel system in the Lansing, Michigan area. Here are a few of our recent related publications:

Nesbitt, Monica. 2018. Economic change and the decline of raised TRAP in Lansing, MI. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 46.
Uehara, Sayako and Suzanne Evans Wagner. 2018. Progressive outliers in listener perception of sound change. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 46.
Wagner, Suzanne E., Alexander Mason, Monica Nesbitt, Erin Pevan & Matt Savage. 2016. Reversal and re-organization of the Northern Cities Shift in Michigan. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 44.

Faculty / Graduate Students / Publications

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.