Hello! I'm a linguist, interested in theoretical phonology and in the spatial and temporal dimensions of language change. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, on the ESRC-funded project Investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media. I have a PhD and MA in Linguistics from the University of Manchester, and a BS in Physics from the California Institute of Technology.
I'm interested in various phonological topics (the formation of active classes, the development of phonological rules, sonorant phonology, local and long-distance consonant interactions, the formal structure of phonological representations) and in mathematical models of language change and dialect geography. Uniting these, one of my major current directions is the relationship between geographically-sensitive variation in the structure of related phonological rules and the diachronic pathway of phonologisation.
My PhD thesis, Similarity and representations in sonorant phonology (December 2018) was supervised by Yuni Kim and Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero. The title was a little misleading; the thesis deals with the nature of class formation and phonologisation in synchrony and diachrony, and with the role that parameters like similarity can play in the organisation of processes of analogical generalisation. There's also a subsidiary focus therein on the Turkic languages, in which I have a particular interest. (Contact me for a copy of the thesis.)
At Cambridge, I'm working on the ESRC-funded project Investigating the diffusion of morphosyntactic innovations using social media with David Willis, Adrian Leemann, and Tam Blaxter. Our interest is in the spatial patterning of morphosyntactic variation in British English, Welsh, Norwegian-Swedish-Danish, and Turkish; we're building large, geographically-rich corpora of Twitter posts in those languages.
Technical: Python, R, Matlab, Praat analysis & scripting, GIS systems, HTML5/CSS. Languages: English, Swedish, Turkish, French, Spanish (in descending order of proficiency)
I was born in Darlington, England, in late 1991. I like string quartets, early-twentieth-century poetry, birdwatching, and very small cups of coffee. There is little actual phonetic realisation of stress in my name, but it's probably in there somewhere.
dg537 cam ac uk, punctuate as required
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