About
A short academic biography: where the work comes from, what it covers, and the questions behind it.
I am a sociolinguist working on language variation and change. I completed my PhD in Linguistics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, where my thesis, Variation and Conventionalisation: Rhotacization in Beijing Dialect, was supervised by James Walker, Lauren Gawne and David Bradley.
My route into variationist work began in China. I hold a Master of Literature in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Beijing Language and Culture University, where my thesis was a case study of language maintenance and shift in a Mongolian village, and a Bachelor of Arts in English from Dalian Minzu University. Fieldwork has been a constant since then: sociolinguistic fieldwork in Beijing and Hebei, phonological documentation of Kharchin Mongolian in Inner Mongolia, and dialect surveys of Gan and Hui varieties.
Alongside my own research I have taught undergraduate linguistics at La Trobe, advised postgraduate researchers on quantitative analysis in R, and worked on speech transcription and annotation for sociolinguistic and language-technology projects.
Research questions
Questions that run through my work:
- How does phonological variation become conventionalised in the lexicon and grammar of a variety?
- When a variable spans phonology, morphology and the lexicon, where should the envelope of variation be drawn?
- How do speakers of a prestigious local variety position themselves in relation to a national standard?
- What sustains or erodes intergenerational language transmission in multilingual communities?
Get in touch
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