Unravelling complex linguistic dynamics: Rhotacization in Beijing dialect
In Walker, J. A., et al. (Eds.), Diversity in Dialect and Language: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XVIII (Melbourne, 2024). Language Science Press
PhD in Linguistics
Claire Jingyuan Ye
La Trobe University, Melbourne · Melbourne, Australia
I am a sociolinguist working on language variation and change. My research asks how phonological variation becomes conventionalised — how a variable sound pattern settles into the lexicon and grammar of a speech community, and how speakers use it to position themselves socially.
My doctoral work, completed at La Trobe University, examines rhotacization in Beijing Mandarin, drawing on thirteen months of fieldwork in Beijing and a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews with more than sixty speakers. I combine variationist methods with quantitative modelling in R, including mixed-effects and Bayesian approaches.
Research areas
- Sociolinguistics
- Language variation and change
- Chinese dialectology
- Sociophonetics
- Quantitative and qualitative methods in linguistics
Research
All research themes-
Rhotacization and conventionalisation in Beijing Mandarin
How does rhotacization in Beijing Mandarin vary across speakers and linguistic contexts, and how does that variation become conventionalised?
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Social meaning: negotiating Beijingness and standardness
How do speakers place themselves between a local Beijing identity and the standard language?
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Multifactorial approaches to variation in Mandarin
What combination of factors conditions the ordering of causal clauses in Mandarin Chinese?
Selected publications
All publications-
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Contextualizing the variation in causal clause ordering in Mandarin Chinese: A multifactorial analysis
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
Recent talks
All talks and conferences-
Variation and Conventionalisation: Rhotacization in Beijing Chinese
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How do speakers place themselves?
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Exploring rhotacization in Beijing dialect from a variationist perspective