Sali Tagliamonte | |
---|---|
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Ottawa |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of Toronto |
Main interests | Sociolinguistics,English varieties,Language change |
Sali A. Tagliamonte FRSC is a Canadian linguist. Her main area of research is the field of language variation and change.
Tagliamonte received a Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics from York University in 1981,and a Master of Arts in 1983 and a Ph.D. in 1991 in Linguistics from University of Ottawa. [1] Her graduate thesis,supervised by Shana Poplack,looked at past temporal reference structures in SamanáEnglish.
Tagliamonte has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 2001,where she currently serves as Chair of the Department of Linguistics. [2] Tagliamonte is also an Honorary Visiting Professor in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science at the University of York. [3] She currently holds the title of Canada Research Chair in Language Variation and Change. [4] [5]
Tagliamonte held a number of professional positions before joining the faculty of the University of Toronto. From 1995 to 2002 she held the position of Adjunct Professor at the Linguistics Department at University of Ottawa. She was a lecturer at the University of York on two occasions,in 1995 and 2000 and held a position of Visiting Assistant Professor there in 2001 until she became a professor at the University of Toronto.
Tagliamonte's widely-cited research has focused on varieties of English. [6] In particular,her work has focused on Ontario English,including projects related to speech communities looking at various communities in Toronto,North Bay,South Porcupine,Kirkland Lake,Haliburton,Almonte,Wilno,Kapuskasing and Barry's Bay. [7] She also collaborated with Jennifer Smith (sociolinguist) FRSE on dialects in Scotland and North America. [8] Tagliamonte has also worked on internet and youth language. [9] [10] [11] She is a co-creator of a variable rule program,Goldvarb. [12]
Tagliamonte was a Killam Research Fellow from 2013-2015 [13] and has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada since 2013. [14]
She was a media expert for the Linguistic Society of America in 2013. She was an associate editor of Language from 2007-2010. [15]
In 2017,Tagliamonte was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. [16]
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study of the effect of any or all aspects of society,including cultural norms,expectations,and context,on language and the ways it is used. It can overlap with the sociology of language,which focuses on the effect of language on society. Sociolinguistics overlaps considerably with pragmatics and is closely related to linguistic anthropology.
African-American English is the set of English sociolects spoken by most Black people in the United States and many in Canada;most commonly,it refers to a dialect continuum ranging from African-American Vernacular English to a more standard American English. Like all widely spoken language varieties,African-American English shows variation stylistically,generationally,geographically,in rural versus urban characteristics,in vernacular versus standard registers,etc. There has been a significant body of African-American literature and oral tradition for centuries.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is the variety of English natively spoken,particularly in urban communities,by most working- and middle-class African Americans and some Black Canadians. Having its own unique grammatical,vocabulary,and accent features,AAVE is employed by middle-class Black Americans as the more informal and casual end of a sociolinguistic continuum. However,in formal speaking contexts,speakers tend to switch to more standard English grammar and vocabulary,usually while retaining elements of the nonstandard accent. Despite being widespread throughout the United States,AAVE is not the native dialect of all African Americans,and not all speakers are African American.
Peter Trudgill,TBA is an English sociolinguist,academic and author.
J. K. "Jack" Chambers is a Canadian linguist,and a well-known expert on language variation and change,who has played an important role in research on Canadian English since the 1980s;he has coined the terms "Canadian Raising" and "Canadian Dainty",the latter used for Canadian speech that mimics the British,popular till the mid-20th century. He has been a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto since receiving his a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1970. He has also been a visiting professor at many universities worldwide,including Hong Kong University,University of Szeged,Hungary,University of Kiel in Germany,Canterbury University in New Zealand,the University of Reading and the University of York in the UK. He is the author of the website Dialect Topography,which compiles information about dialectal variation in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario,Canada.
SamanáEnglish is a variety of the English language spoken by descendants of black immigrants from the United States who have lived in the SamanáPeninsula,now in the Dominican Republic. Members of the enclave are known as the SamanáAmericans.
Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her research interests include language variation and change,language contact and dialect convergence,and language in education,with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation,especially syntax and discourse structures,in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.
Gregory Riordan Guy is a linguist who specializes in the study of language variation and language diversity,including sociolinguistics,historical linguistics,phonetics,and phonology. He has a particular interest in the Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish languages.
Variable rules analysis is a set of statistical analysis methods in linguistics that are commonly used in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics to describe patterns of variation between alternative forms in language use. It is also sometimes known as Varbrul analysis,after the name of a software package dedicated to carrying out the relevant statistical computations. The method goes back to a theoretical approach developed by the sociolinguist William Labov in the late 1960s and early 1970s,and its mathematical implementation was developed by Henrietta Cedergren and David Sankoff in 1974.
Variation is a characteristic of language:there is more than one way of saying the same thing. Speakers may vary in pronunciation (accent),word choice (lexicon),or morphology and syntax. But while the diversity of variation is great,there seem to be boundaries on variation –speakers do not generally make drastic alterations in word order or use novel sounds that are completely foreign to the language being spoken. Linguistic variation does not equate to language ungrammaticality,but speakers are still sensitive to what is and is not possible in their native lect.
African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has been the center of controversy about the education of African-American youths,the role AAVE should play in public schools and education,and its place in broader society.
Diane Massam is a Canadian linguist,Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Shana Poplack,is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa and three time holder of the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics. She is a leading proponent of variation theory,the approach to language science pioneered by William Labov. She has extended the methodology and theory of this field into bilingual speech patterns,the prescription-praxis dialectic in the co-evolution of standard and non-standard languages,and the comparative reconstruction of ancestral speech varieties,including African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) is an annual academic conference in sociolinguistics. NWAV attracts researchers and students conducting linguistic scientific investigations into patterns of language variation,the study of language change in progress,and the interrelationship between language and society,including how language variation is shaped by and continually shapes societal institutions,social and interpersonal relationships,and individual and group identities.
Monica Heller is a Canadian linguistic anthropologist and Professor at the University of Toronto. She was the president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) from 2013 to 2015.
Gillian Elizabeth Sankoff is a Canadian-American sociolinguist,and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Sankoff's notable former students include Miriam Meyerhoff.
David Sankoff is a Canadian mathematician,bioinformatician,computer scientist and linguist. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics in the Mathematics and Statistics Department at the University of Ottawa,and is cross-appointed to the Biology Department and the School of Information Technology and Engineering. He was founding editor of the scientific journal Language Variation and Change (Cambridge) and serves on the editorial boards of a number of bioinformatics,computational biology and linguistics journals. Sankoff is best known for his pioneering contributions in computational linguistics and computational genomics. He is considered to be one of the founders of bioinformatics. In particular,he had a key role in introducing dynamic programming for sequence alignment and other problems in computational biology. In Pavel Pevzner's words,"[ Michael Waterman ] and David Sankoff are responsible for transforming bioinformatics from a ‘stamp collection' of ill-defined problems into a rigorous discipline with important biological applications."
Keren D. Rice is a Canadian linguist. She is a professor of linguistics and serves as the Director of the Centre for Aboriginal Initiatives at the University of Toronto.
Walter Spencer Avis was one of the foremost Canadian linguists of his day. Throughout the 1950s to his death at age 60,Avis' mission has been described as "plant[ing] into the minds of his compatriots the notion of Canadian English (CanE) as related but different from other "Englishes"."
Jennifer Smith,PhD,FRSE is a sociolinguistic specialist in language variation and dialects,especially Scottish dialects across the generations and geography of Scotland,including developing the Scottish syntax atlas which analyses the diversity. Her research also covers variations in colonial English,for example,in North America. Professor of sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow School of Critical Studies,she teaches and researches language and variation theory.