Research
Stylistic variation is my main research area, with a focus on phonetic/phonological variables. Style leads logically to a preoccupation with identity.I am also interested in intonation and prosody, and their "social meaning," broadly construed--moving beyond the utterance-level effects of prosody, what meanings do contours carry? Do particular contours have specific social distributions?
Other assorted interests include language and nationalism, looking at the history of Standard Chinese in particular, and whatever statistical novelties I have time to try and learn about.
Projects
In my recent work I have been examining prosodic variability in Mandarin Chinese. I have presented this work at NWAV (PPT) and reported on it for my QP1 (PDF) as well.My main project on stylistic variation has looked at the cross-situation realization of /ay/ and /ey/ in the speech of George W. Bush. I am also working on the project looking at stance, style and the construction of classed identities on Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs.
In a broader variationist vein, I also did a variationist corpus study of a Mandarin epistemic modal marker (ma/me). This was my BA thesis work (download if you dare), and I have continued to develop it since I graduated (download of NWAV 2007 poster). It has roots in a corpus survey, but takes a (far-off) view to the relationships between language, place, and modernity in the Chinese-speaking world.