Ongoing projects

Off-pitch? Perceptions of female football commentators w/ Louis Strange (Glasgow) & Sophie Holmes-Elliott (QMUL)

This is a multi-pronged project involving both experimental and critical discourse analytical methods. In the experimental side of the project, we are running a perception experiment to test the effect of pitch manipulations on social evaluations of football commentators; the focus on pitch stems from the popular critique that women’s voices are “too high” for football commentary. We recently presented this work at UKLVC 14 in Edinburgh, for which the slides are available here. In the critical discourse analytical side, we are focusing on the categories constructed in a variety of forms of social media in the discourse around female football commentators.

Linguistic factors in expectations about variation w/ Charlotte Vaughn (Oregon)

This project is focused on what knowledge listeners have of the internal linguistic constraints on sociolinguistic variation. Building on Charlotte’s previous work on variable (ING), we are current applying a similar methodology to improve our understanding of perceptions of TH-fronting in the UK. We recently gave a talk on this topic at NWAV50, for which the slides are available here. You can also watch a pre-recorded version of the talk is available on this Google Drive, along with other talks from the conference. We will soon be collecting further data to examine the variable social salience of TH-fronting dependent on its internal linguistic constraints.

Pragmatic alternatives and social meaning w/ Eric Acton (East Michigan)

This project is part of an ongoing collaboration with Eric Acton, with whom I previously published in Journal of Pragmatics (see here). Our current focus is on how social meaning can be pragmatically derived in situations where speakers have opted for a more linguistically costly/marked form with no clear benefit in informatively. In particular, we are currently looking at anaphoric uses of phrases like the guy and the place using corpus linguistic methods. A recently submitted abstract on this topic is available here.

Perceptions of gesture and overlapping speech w/ Pamela Perniss (Cologne)

This project stems from my brief time working at the University of Cologne as a postdoctoral researcher as part of the larger Cluster Development Program focused on the topic of Language Challenges and Feedback Signals. As part of this specific sub-project of the program, we are aiming to test the social meanings that may arise from the interaction between overlapping speech and co-speech gesture, including eye gaze and iconic hand gestures. A short conference abstract based on this project is available here.