Current members and alumni
Faculty:
Renee Blake
Renee Blake (Stanford ‘97) is an Associate Professor with a dual appointment in the Departments of Linguistics and Social & Cultural Analysis. Her research focuses on language contact, race, ethnicity and class, with a focus on African American English, Caribbean English Creoles and New York City English. Renee prides herself on working with graduate students and closely mentoring them to develop their research and hone their skills, often co-authoring publications with them.
Greg Guy (Personal website)
Gregory R. Guy has been working at New York University since 2001, following previous positions at Sydney, Cornell, Stanford, York, and several Brazilian universities. His research interests include language variation and change, language and social class, ethnicity, language contact, and theoretical models of linguistic variation. He has done original sociolinguistic research in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, New Zealand and the United States. He is the co-author of Sociolingüística Quantitativa (São Paulo: Parábola), and editor of Towards a Social Science of Language (Amsterdam: Benjamins). His most recent papers dealt with the effects of lexical frequency on Spanish pro-drop (in Language, 2012, with Daniel Erker), and with the co-variation of several phonological and syntactic variables in Brazilian Portuguese (Journal of Pragmatics, 2013).
Laurel MacKenzie (Personal website)
Laurel MacKenzie (Penn ’12) joined NYU Linguistics in 2016, following an appointment at the University of Manchester. Her research investigates how sociolinguistic variation and the conditions that govern it are stored and produced by the linguistic system. Specific topics of interest include the grammatical locus of morphophonological variables, the nature of language change across an individual’s lifespan, and the role of psycholinguistic factors in the production of variation, with side interests in the dialectology of England and France. She is co-author of Doing Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide to Data Collection and Analysis (Routledge, 2015).
John Singler
It was as a high school teacher in Liberia that John Singler was drawn to the study of language. After getting an M.A. in African Area Studies (SOAS, London) and an M.A. and Ph.D. in linguistics (UCLA), John came to NYU in 1984. Throughout his career, he has devoted himself in particular to contact linguistics—especially creole studies—and to variationist sociolinguistics. His work within creole studies has focused on West African pidgins, particularly those spoken in Liberia, and on the sociohistorical context of creole genesis. He has also published on Liberian Settler English, a diaspora descendant of nineteenth-century African American English. He is co-editor of The Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Studies (Blackwell, 2008) and of a special issue of The International Journal of Bilingualism devoted to “Codeswitching in West Africa” (2014). In addition, John works on New York City English and with Zvjezdana Vrzic on the contribution of sociolinguistic factors to the endangerment of Vlashki/Zheyanski (RUO), an endangered Eastern Romance language spoken in Croatia. John will be retiring after the 2014-15 academic year in order to pursue his research fulltime. He plans to remain active in the Sociolinguistics Lab.
Gary Thoms (Personal Website)
Gary is a syntactician with a secondary interest in sociolinguistics. He joined NYU Linguistics in 2018, coming from a postdoctoral position as part of the Scots Syntax Atlas, a large-scale dialect atlas project which brought together sociolinguists and syntacticians. He has worked on various topics in dialect syntax, such as ellipsis, auxiliary contraction, negation, negative concord, predicative possession, and ditransitive constructions, and he is also interested in methodological issues surrounding the use of judgment data in dialect research.
Zvjezdana Vrzic (Adjunct)
Zvjezdana Vrzic has worked on the documentation and description of Vlashki/Zheyanski (RUO), the endangered Eastern Romance language spoken in Croatia, for the last several years. Her aim is to create a large-scale annotated audio-video corpus of the language with the dictionary and a language and community archive. Her theoretical interests are in contact linguistics (the interaction of social factors and linguistic constraints in the area of syntactic contact-induced language change in creole genesis and bilingualism). Lately, she has become interested in the relationship between language and identity in the borderland area of Istria in Croatia, specifically, in the Vlashi/Zheyanski-speaking communities. She is beginning work on the documentation of the Istriot language, another unique endangered Western Romance language spoken in Croatia. In her language documentation work, she strives to combine the interests of the discipline with the greater good of the community and aims for wide accessibility of project products and education and participation of community members.
Current Students:
Naomi Lee
Morphosyntax, syntactic variation and change, Khoekhoe, Serbo-Croatian
Kimberley Baxter
Computational Sociolinguistics, Syntax, Forensic Linguistics, African American Language, Jamaican Patois, Twitter Language
Chiara Repetti-Ludlow
Phonetics/phonology, first language acquisition, neurolinguistics, language change
Alden McCollum
Spanish, (Peruvian) Quechua, Language and Identity, Language and the Law, Migration, Performativity, Sociophonetics, Sociocultural Linguistics
José Álvarez Retamales
Puerto Rican Spanish, Sociophonetics, Language and Identity, Raciolinguistics, Sociocultural Linguistics
Shasteny Cabrera Roldan
Puerto Rican Spanish, Computer Mediated Communication, Language and Identity, Sociocultural Linguistics
Jess Göbel
Bilingualism, Sociophonetics, Second Language Acquisition, Social Mobility and Variation
Molly Cutler
Sociosyntax, Dialect Variation, Sociopragmatics/Discourse, Language and Identity, Acquisition/Cognition & Variation
Recent Alumni:
Sarah Phillips
Bilingualism, African-American English, Korean
Postdoctoral Scholar
Georgetown University
Mary Robinson
Morphosyntax, Sorbian, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese
Research Associate
Newcastle University
Maddie Gilbert
Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, contact linguistics, sociophonetics
Postdoctoral Researcher
Sorbonne Nouvelle/CNRS
Natalie Povilonis de Vilchez
Contact linguistics, language and identity, Quechua & Andean Spanish
Postdoctoral Scholar
Indiana University, Bloomington
Allison Shapp
Computer Mediated Communication, Language and Identity, New York City English
Adjunct Professor
New York University – New York
Suzy Ahn
Lexical Blending, Phonological variation, Bilingualism (English & Korean)
Assistant Professor
University of Ottawa – Ottawa, Canada
Libby Coggshall
Language & (place/ethnic) identity, sociophonetics, New York City English, American Indian English
Isaac Bleaman
Language contact, language shift, variation and ethnicity, Yiddish
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
University of California – Berkeley
Dan Duncan
Suburbanization, language and performance, phonetic/phonological/syntactic variation, the speech community
Lecturer in Sociolinguistics
Newcastle University – Tyne
Zack Jaggers
Loanword variation, sociophonetics, language contact ideology and political partisanship
Postdoctoral Scholar at the Speech Perception and Production Lab
University of Oregon – Eugene
Becky Laternus
Acoustic phonetics, L2 production and perception, perceptual adaptation to accented speech
Amazon, Alexa Team
Marie-Eve Bouchard
Creole Languages, Popular Brazilian Portuguese, Santomean Portuguese, language contact, language ideologies
Assistant Professor, Department of French, Hispanic and Italian Studies
University of British Columbia – Vancouver, Canada
Nate LaFave
Amazon, Alexa Team
Nicole Holliday
“What does it mean to sound black?” from the perspectives of speakers and listeners, with a special focus on intonational and prosodic variables.
Assistant Professor
University of Pennsylvania – Philadelphia
Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz
Senior Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations
College of William and Mary – Williamsburg
Cara Shousterman
Program Director
Queensborough CUNY Techworks – New York