Research

My doctoral research examines rhotacization — the addition of an r-colouring to a syllable rime — as it is used by speakers of Beijing Mandarin. The variable sits at the boundary between phonology, morphology and the lexicon, which makes it a useful case for asking how a pattern of variation settles into a conventional part of a variety.

The project draws on thirteen months of fieldwork in Beijing, carried out across two periods and funded by La Trobe University. I designed and conducted sociolinguistic interviews, reading tasks, picture description tasks and targeted elicitation with more than sixty participants, and annotated the resulting speech data across phonetic, morphophonological and contextual layers.

A second strand of the work looks at what speakers do with variation rather than what conditions it. Rhotacization carries strong local associations, and speakers in Beijing navigate between those associations and the pull of Standard Mandarin.

This strand uses the same interview corpus, read alongside speakers own commentary on how they and others talk.

Alongside the phonological work, I use corpus data and multifactorial modelling to study variation in Mandarin grammar. This collaborative strand treats word-order variation as conditioned by several interacting factors at once, rather than by any single constraint.

Before the doctorate, my research addressed language maintenance and shift. My masters thesis was a case study of a Mongolian-speaking village, based on fieldwork with more than a hundred participants investigating language vitality, intergenerational transmission and community language practices.

Related documentation work includes describing the phonological system of Kharchin Mongolian as part of the Project for the Protection of Language Resources of China, and phonological surveys of the Quanfeng (Gan) and Chunan (Hui) dialect groups.