Research
Language and Place
My research and project work are situated in applied sociolinguistics with a focus on language documentation and place. These avenues of investigation align with a larger project I direct, the Southern Ohio Language Project (SOLP). The primary objective of the SOLP is corpus construction via sociolinguistic interviews while also supporting wide-ranging efforts at language documentation, maintenance and preservation. Students, both graduate and undergraduate, are trained in sociolinguistic interviewing protocols while also being trained to recognize the uniqueness and the function of the language forms they bring to this campus and to our classrooms. This developing corpus provides phonetic, phonological, syntactic, as well as pragmatic and discourse-level data for comparison within and across communities of users.
Applied Linguistics
I am a Sociolinguist and everything I teach and research centers the idea of language/language variation and place as well as the fact that every form of language we use reveals aspects of our intersecting identities. Whether these identities be socioeconomically linked, regionally linked, gendered or chronologically categorized, all of our language forms tell the story of who we are, who we recognize and who we do, or at least want to, connect with and understand. This is why language matters to everyone’s success - no matter how you define success.