Forthcoming
- My dissertation is titled, "Emotions are relational: positioning and the use of affective linguistic resources". Here are some key themes:
- Quantitative methods for studying affect in language
- Experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics
- Sociolinguistics, pragmatics
- Corpus linguistics
- Affective scope (involving the role of ordering and argument structure--how are affective linguistic resources embedded in discourse?)
- Positioning, style, stance, footing, alignment
- Measuring emotional intensity in a conversation, turn-by-turn
- Diminutives and the affective uses of "little"
- The meaning of emoticons and other affective resources in Twitter
- "Affective patterns using words and emoticons in Twitter." University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Selected Papers from NWAV 40.
- This is largely based on my NWAV presentation last fall, which you can view/read here.
- I believe in collaboration and I really enjoy it, too. Here are three current projects:
- Tania Kuteva and I have are writing a book that combines insights from grammaticalization theories and information theory. It is a "panchronic" model of grammar that unites cognitive and social aspects of language, as well as synchronic and diachronic perspectives. The data at its core are "semantically elaborate structures" (e.g., avertive morphemes) and theticals (i.e., discourse markers/particles, etc. like you know, say).
- David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein, and I have been working on "Gender in Twitter: Styles, stances, and social networks". Here's a video of me presenting the work in Budapest: http://vimeo.com/46531227 (skip to 2:10 to avoid the YouTube audio issues)..
- I've been working with Morgan Sonderegger and Peter Graff on accommodation, variation, and change in a longitudinal corpus (season 8 of the UK's version of Big Brother).
Past work
Research methodsThroughout all the work on this page, I look to identify, develop, and use reliable, quantitative methods to answer linguistic questions.
- I keep a blog (http://corplinguistics.wordpress.com) to keep people informed about corpora that are available and how to use them, often modeling tips and techniques by pursuing research questions.
- Here's the presentation I gave to introduce corpus linguistics to undergraduate majors in linguistics.
- Can we use crowdsourcing (Amazon's Mechanical Turk, in particular) for linguistic research? Work with Victor Kuperman. Psihologija, 43: 441-464.
- Quick, informal presentation given to Stanford psychologists and psycholinguists.
- “A new generation of data: Crowdsourcing and language studies.” 85th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Presented on behalf of a group including Robert Munro, Steven Bethard, David Clausen, Victor Kuperman, Vicky Tzuyin Lai, Robin Melnick, Christopher Potts, and Harry Tily.) January 9, 2011.
- A paper on "Measuring the compositionality of phrasal verbs", including a lengthy appendix to show how to build and evaluate statistical models in R.
- "A statistical model of grammatical choices in children's productions of dative sentences" with Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Scott Grimm, Uriel Cohen Priva, Sander Lestrade, Gorkem Ozbek, Susannah Kirby, Misha Becker, Vivienne Fong, and Joan Bresnan. To appear in the volume of papers for "Formal Approaches to Variation in Syntax" held May 10-12, 2007 at the King's Manor in York, England.
You can find more resources (unpublished essays and reading notes) by going to http://www.stanford.edu/~tylers/emotions.shtml.
- "Affective patterns using words and emoticons in Twitter." NWAV 40 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation), Georgetown University, Washington, DC. October 30, 2011.
- "A little emotional: Diminutives, affect, and power." i-MEAN 2: Meaning and Context, University of the West of England, Bristol, U.K.. April 15, 2011.
- Here's the paper version.
- "Studying affect and emotion in the field." Fieldwork Forum, University of California, Berkeley. October 19, 2011.
- “The emotional profile of words.” La Journée Scientifique du LLACAN (Langues et Cultures d’Afrique Noire), Villejuif, France. December 10, 2010.
- “Introduction to emotion detection.” Web seminar at Nuance Software, Sunnyvale, California. November 17, 2010.
- "Variation in speech tempo: Capt. Kirk, Mr. Spock, and all of us in between." NWAV 39 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation), San Antonia, Texas. November 4, 2010.
- Here's an earlier paper version: The social meaning of tempo. What does t mean to be a fast-talker? A slower-talker? Captain James T. Kirk?
- Here's an in-class hand-out summary and a web-based indexical field of speech tempo.
- And perahps most importantly, here's a "how to get YouTube into Praat" document.
While I do look at historical linguistics with an eye to phonology, the majority of my work has been focused on understanding grammatical patterns (e.g., involving word order).
- “Shabo is an isolate.” Language Isolates in Africa Workshop, Dynamique du Langage, Lyon, France. December 3, 2010. (Here is the video of my presentation.)
- I've been presenting on Shabo for several years now, so if you'd like any earlier presentations, please feel free to contact me, though I consider the Lyon presentation to be the "latest and greatest".
- If you prefer a paper version, try, "What, if anything, is Shabo related to? (Unclassified, Ethiopia)".
- I use phylogenetic methods, here's a how-to for you to use these same methods/software on your languages of interest.
- I also prepared a coding summary for the most genetically stable features in WALS.
- I have a grammar of Shabo (Unclassified, Ethiopia) and am working on one for Shekkacho (Omotic, Ethiopia) and Majang (Nilo-Saharan, Ethiopia). Let me know if you'd like any of them.
- A brief squib describing the phonotactics of a Hawaiian myth, "He mo‘olelo kēia no ke kūpe‘e" (Austronesian, Hawai'i).
- A complete translation of a fairy tale in Sayula Popoluca (Mixe-Zoquean, Mexico), with annotations of interesting features of the language.
- A dictionary of Keiga Jirru (Nilo-Saharan, Sudan), based on the handwritten notes of Roland Stevenson.
- A usability analysis of Kirrkirr, a tool for visualizing indigenous language dictionaries (it's pretty cool for community members to play around with and it's helpful for linguists, too).
I have a variety of other resources available across the website. Check out my class notes or reading summaries, for example.
- An OT analysis of laryngeal harmony in Ndebele/Zulu (Bantu, South Africa).
- A fun paper describing the nominal morphology of Zulu loan words.
- Categories and taxonomies in design as considered from a linguistic perspective.
- And a presentation on designing with language given as part of Microsoft's Engineering Excellence Talk series in July 2007.
- The syntax and semantics of Japanese datives.
- A couple papers on passive benefactives:
- Experiments on the acceptability of passive benefactives and suggestions for developing the Sign-Based Construction Grammar framework.
- A lexical-semantic look at benefactives in general. I bite off more than I can chew in this one, ranging from English to Japanese to Kinyarwanda to Salish.
- Current thinking in social network theory and how it might be applied to sociolinguistic studies.
- A lengthier squib that tackles the role of the linguist in the system they observe. It takes a cue from cybernetics for modeling the interactions of various participants. It also proposes including community members in the analysis of the data and the evaulation of the linguist's conclusions.