Adam Barnhardt is a Linguistics PhD student. Adam’s research primarily focused on phonetic/phonological variation and Adam is interested in examining how the implementation of this variation as a means to position oneself within culture and society might intersect with language change broadly.
Annan Kirk is a PhD student specializing in sociolinguistics, with particular interests in discourse-pragmatic variation, sociosyntax, grammaticalization, and queer linguistics. She’s interested in the ways in which linguistic variation operates below the level of conscious awareness within a community, and how this variation can spread and acquire social meaning over time. She is also engaged with the broader theoretical challenge of investigating variables which don’t qualify for semantic equivalence but still pattern together. Currently, Annan is working on examining the distribution of intensifiers in Michigan English.
Connor Bechler is a Linguistics PhD student. Connor’s primary theoretical interests are in socially motivated language change, language attitudes/ideologies, and the phonetics/phonology interface. His research focuses on investigating these areas through quantitative analysis of speech corpora, particularly those resulting from language documentation projects or participant-driven research projects, and building computational tools to facilitate such investigations.
Emily Duggan is an MA student in Linguistics. She is primarily interested in socioindexicality, language ideology, LGBTQ+ linguistics, semantics and pragmatics. She is currently working on her MA thesis which involves the social meanings of certain queer identity terms. In the future, she hopes to investigate how theories of semantic, pragmatic, and social meaning might interact to form a unified theory of interpretation.
Hamlin Teng is a Linguistics MA student. He is interested in variationist sociolinguistics and language ecology. He is also learning statistical and other quantitative methods used in linguistics. He is currently searching for his specific research focus.
Jessica Shepherd is a Linguistics PhD student. Jessica’s primary interests are sociolinguistics, phonetics, and phonology. She’s particularly interested in how people use language to communicate meaning, what drives language change, and the phonetic and phonological variations that exist between different speech communities. She is currently working on post-tonic pronunciation variation in Michigan English.
Other students
- Drake Howard is a Linguistics major and a former Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller (2022-2024).
- Julia Bolash is an Experience Architecture major and a Professorial Assistant to Dr. Betsy Sneller (2024-2025).
- To see all the students working for the MI Diaries project, check out the project’s Meet the Team page