I am currently in my fourth year of the PhD program at the University of Oregon, with an interest in sociolinguistics, and sociophonetics in particular. Before coming to Oregon, I received my MA in English Linguistics at North Carolina State University under Erik Thomas and Walt Wolfram. My work primarily focuses on suprasegmental features of African American English (AAE), particularly prosody (intonation and rhythm). Using modern recordings from older speakers from Raleigh, NC as well as archival recordings of ex-slaves (the Library of Congress) and ex-confederates (Joseph Hall Tapes), I am interested in better understanding how pitch accents within intonational phrases behave over time in both Southern AAE and Southern European American English.
In addition, collaborating with Charlie Farrington, I have also been looking at the relative stress of Remote Past (stressed) BIN in southern AAE as well as other aspectual features (habitual be and completive done) in a longitudinal corpus and how these features of AAE interact with other camouflaged forms found in other varieties of American English.
With Tyler Kendall and Charlie Farrington, we have been attempting to better understand language variation in Oregon, which is underexamined, currently focusing on the language of the Willamette Valley. In one study, we investigated how Oregonians and others in the Pacific Northwest encode past habituality, focusing on the alternation between used to (e.g. “we used to go to the coast, like every other weekend”), would (e.g. “me and my brother would go hunt birds all the time”), and simple past forms (e.g. “we usually went to Portland twice a year”). Additionally, using modern recordings, as well as archival recordings from the Dictionary of American Regional English (see http://www.daredictionary.com), Tyler and Charlie and I have been able to track the progress of sound changes in Oregon. This work has shown that some vowel features continue to show incremental change over time, while other vowel patterns in Oregon English appear to have developed earlier in the 20th century and do not show differences between older and younger contemporary speakers, highlighting the fact many relevant changes to the Oregon vowel system occurred in the time period between the two World Wars.
More recently, I have begun working on helping Tyler Kendall develop an online corpus of African American English for his NSF grant Enhancing Data and Tools For Research and Education on African American English. This project aims to help both researchers and educators by having both linguistically annotated spoken language data along with publicly oriented web-based resources. These resources will enable a wide-range of researchers, as well as the public, to more robustly understand the variety.