Papers
My main research interest is the
interaction of abstract phonological structure with the direction of
phonetic and phonological change, and how that interaction is manifested
in dialect variation. Recently I've also started doing research on the nature of the linguistic variable as a grammatical and sociolinguistic entity. My Ph.D. is from the Linguistics department at U.Penn;
the title of my dissertation is Dialect Boundaries
and Phonological Change in Upstate New York. (If you don't feel
like reading the whole dissertation, this
handout hits most of the main points; or you could just read the abstract. If you'd prefer to read it in a
more oddball format, here's the double-dactyl
version and the version using only the
top 1000 most common English words. And of course bits and pieces of it can be found divided up among five or six of the papers listed below.)
Below are links to most of my research. Successive versions of the same paper are listed in reverse chronological order, so the top one takes precedence, and supersedes the others in case of conflict.
You can also read my full CV.
Dialects of Upstate New York
Deconstructing the Linguistic Variable
- Is Like Like Like?: Evaluating the Same Variant Across Multiple Variables (with Ruth Maddeaux).
- Variant-Centered Variation and the Like Conspiracy.
Phonological Structure of Vowel Shifts and Mergers
- Grandfawther's Mardi Graw: The PALM vowel in New Orleans (with Katie Carmichael).
- Gradience, Allophony, and Chain Shifts (with Robin Dodsworth).
- Phonological Transfer as a Forerunner of Merger in Upstate New
York.
- What's Really Happening to Short A Before L in Philadelphia?
- Toward a Unified Theory of Chain Shifting.
- Nasal Short-a Systems vs. the Northern Cities Shift.
- The
Real Effect of Word Frequency on Phonetic Variation.
- Unnatural Classes and Phonological Generalization in Dialect
Formation.
- Talk presented at NWAV 35, Columbus, Ohio,
November 2006. Handout (PDF).
- Mary, Darling, Make Me Merry; Say You'll Marry Me: Tense-Lax
Neutralization in the Linguistic Atlas of New England.
- Paper (PDF)
published in Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 11.2.73–90 (2005).
- Marry-Merry-Mary Merger in New England: Further
Analysis. Talk presented at Methods in Dialectology XII, Moncton, N.B., August 2005.
Handout (PDF).
- Mary, Darling, Make Me Merry; Say You'll Marry Me: Tense-Lax
Neutralization in the Linguistic Atlas of New England. Poster presented at NWAV 33, Ann Arbor, Mich., October
2004.
Dialect Contact and Diffusion
Dialect Boundaries
Miscellaneous
- Adjusting to the New Normal(ization): Adapting Atlas of North American English Benchmarks to Lobanov-Normalized Data.
- Making a merger: Social and linguistic factors
in the low back merger in New Orleans English (with Katie Carmichael).
- It's No Problem to be Polite: Apparent-Time Change in Responses to Thanks.
- A Phonological Variable in a Textual Medium: (ing) in Online Chat.
- An Experimental Study on the
Interpretability of Ostensible Subject-Control Promise.
- "Sporadic" Syncope and Latin Phonology's Wicked Stepmother.
My Erdős number is 4:
Erdős & Chvátal (1972); Chvatal & Sankoff (1975); Sankoff &
Labov (1979); Labov, Baranowski, & Dinkin (2010).
Puzzles
I was a member of the
organizing teams for the 2006 and 2011 MIT Mystery Hunts, and have occasionally contributed puzzles to other events as well.
The full list of puzzles I've written or co-written is available here. Contributions (as author or co-author) of which I'm particularly
proud include the following:
Poems
I occasionally write double-dactyls. One time I
made people write
double-dactyls.
Plays
In grad school I did way more on-campus theatre than any grad student legitimately has
time for (mostly with the
Underground Shakespeare Company and Penn Players). Shows I was in at Penn include, but are not limited to:
12 Angry Men, the Penn Theatre Arts
Council's Small Fall show
The Tempest with Underground Shakespeare
You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown with Stimulus Children's
Theater
A Midsummer Night's Dream with Underground Shakespeare
King Lear with Underground Shakespeare
Into the Woods with the Penn Law School
Light Opera Company
Metamorphoses with iNtuitons
Lady
in the Dark with the Penn Theatre Arts Program
Annie Get Your Gun with Penn Players
The Real Inspector Hound, a Small Fall show
Reckless with Penn Players
The Merchant of Venice with Underground Shakespeare
Elsinore! with iNtuitons
Prior to Penn, I music-directed Songs for a New
World at MIT and vocal-directed Les
Phys, my
roommate Peter's masterpiece, at Harvard. Before that, I was music
director of the Harvard
Noteables, sine quibus non.
If you want a more detailed list of shows I've done, look here.
me: ajd@post.harvard.edu
my office: Storm Hall West 236, San Diego State University