News

2021

• José Álvarez Retamales presented their work for NYU GSAS (We)search Workshop Series: Mocking or ‘Relajo’? Identity and in-group joking in Latinx communities. (October 26th)
• NYU at virtual NWAV 49. NYUers past and present are putting in a strong showing at this week’s 49th annual New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference, hosted online by UT Austin. A list of the NYU presenters is located here. (October 19-24)
• Sarah Phillips gave a colloquium talk at Boston University Entitled ” Investigating the syntactic processing of code-switching expression.” (September 28th)
• Gregory Guy spoke on the Coversas da Horas youtube series sponsored by the Universidade Federal da Paraíba and ALFAL, on ‘Perspectivas interculturais sobre variação e mudança lingüística’.  (June 25)
• Congratulations to our 2021 incoming Grad Students: Alden McCollum (Stanford University) and José Álvarez Retamales (North Carolina State University) 
• Kimberley Baxter and Renee Blake wrote an article on Mental Floss entitled: “10 things to know about African American Language”

2020

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2019

• Gregory Guy will be presenting in two panels at the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10) in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, June 26-28.  He is co-organizing a panel session on Coherence, and will present a paper in that panel co-authored with Ronald Mendes and Livia Oushiro, in ‘Indexicality and cohesion’.  He will also present a paper on ‘Variation and the lexicon’ in a panel on Lexical Frequency.

2018

• Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez recently won a Fulbright Hays scholarship to support her dissertation research in Peru!
• Congratulations to Allison Shapp, who recently defended her dissertation titled “A Sociophonetic Analysis of New York City English in the Speech of Teenagers from Nassau County, Long Island”!
• Danny Erker has recently co-edited a volume of papers, which includes a chapter written by Gregory Guy, entitled “Variable Grammars: Competence as a statistical abstraction from performance”.
• Laurel MacKenzie and Mary Robinson led an outreach session for local high school on the sociolinguistics of My Fair Lady.  The event was organized by the Lincoln Center Theater. (November 2018)
• Laurel MacKenzie gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania, called ‘Individual differences and community-level constraints on sociolinguistic variation’. (November 2018)
• Laurel MacKenzie has a new paper in Language Variation and Change, titled ‘Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: Different pa[ð~θ]s of change’.
• Laurel MacKenzie’s co-edited special issue of Linguistic Variation has now appeared as a book!
• NYU Linguistics hosted NWAV47, which was attended by over 300 scholars and students from around the world, as well as dozens of NYU students, faculty, and alumni.  Plenary talks were given by John Rickford (Stanford) and department alum Erez Levon (Queen Mary University, London).  (October 2018) 
• In a recent trip to Brazil, Gregory Guy gave talks at the SOLIN-VIII conference (Universidade Federal de Espírito Santo), and at the Seminário Variação, Mudança e Gêneros Textuais-Discursivos em Foco (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro).  He also gave two colloquium talks: “A variação linguística: modelos, processos, ondas” (Universidade de São Paulo) and “Variação e a representação mental do léxico” (Universidade de Campinas). (June/July 2018)
• Congratulations to Zack Jaggers, who successfully defended his dissertation titled “A combined sociolinguistic and experimental phonetic approach to loanword variation and adaptation” (chaired by Renée Blake and Lisa Davidson)!  Starting in Fall 2018, he will also be working as a postdoctoral scholar in the Speech Production and Production Lab at the University of Oregon. 
• Dan Duncan will be a Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Newcastle University, starting in Fall 2018.  Congratulations!
• Congratulations to Isaac Bleaman, who has successfully defended his dissertation, titled “Outcomes of minority language maintenance: Variation and change in New York Yiddish”! (May)
• Congratulations to NYU sociolinguist graduates Isaac Bleaman, Dan Duncan, Zack Jaggers, and Allison Shapp!
• Marie-Eve Bouchard (PhD 2017) has two new papers out on Saotomean Portuguese: “A distinctive Use of R as a marker of Santomean identity”  (paper here), and “Subject Pronoun Expression in Santomean Portuguese” (paper here)
• Laurel MacKenzie has a paper soon to appear in Language Variation and Change, titled “Variable stem-final fricative voicing in American English plurals: “Different pa[ð ~ θ]s of change.”  See the accepted version here.
• Congratulations to Becky Laturnus and Dan Duncan, who have successfully defended their dissertations!  Becky’s is titled: “The effects of bias, exposure, and input variation on perceptual adaptation to non-native speech” ; Dan’s is titled: “Language Variation and Change in the Geographies of Suburbs.”
• Congratulations to Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez, who has been awarded a GSAS Predoctoral Summer Fellowship! (April)
• Congratulations to Zack Jaggers, who was runner-up in the LSA 5-Minute Linguist Challenge!
• Current NYU sociolinguists present at the annual LSA meeting in Salt Lake City.
  • Rebecca Laturnus: Implicit bias weakens perceptual adaptation to non-native speech
  • Zack Jaggers: Loanword variation and perception: A case of methodological choices and experimental outcomes
  • Isaac Bleaman: Big data in a low resource language: Syntactic variation in Hasidic Yiddish on the web
  • Allison Shapp: Long Island suburbs move towards nasal short-a split, still hold on to NYC features
  • Dan Duncan: Changing language and identity during suburbanization