Since 2021 I have held a joint lab meeting/reading group with Nadine Grimm. We focus on the overlap between the subfields of Language Documentation and Description (LDD) and Language Variation and Change (LVC), including both methodology (the collection of empirical data, the many different methodologies encompassed under the name “fieldwork,” working with people and speech communities), the linguistic data that we and members of our labs are collecting, and methods of analysis. Undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in the intersection of the fields of LDD and LVC are welcome to attend.
We are currently working on a project that investigates how sociolinguistic variation is represented in reference grammars, by tracking where linguistic variation is documented in the language and what explanatory social factors grammar-writers use to explain non-grammatically conditioned variation:
N. Grimm, M.R. Abtahian, R. Everson, C. Aceves, J. Davis, S. Kirshner. Towards a typology of sociolinguistic variation. Association for Linguistic Typology, University of Texas at Austin. Dec 14-16, 2022
Current students in the lab: Jess Charest, Constanza Aceves Rodrigues, Suganya Schmura, Scott Kirshner, Becky Everson, Yizhen Ma, Sreyoshi Basu, Suhasini Patni, and Kai Schenk
Previous students: Jillian Breithaupt, Kylie Pitt, Jamie Davis, and Camille Colby
Maya Ravindranath Abtahian 