Posts


  • Locating Style: Style-Shifting to Characterize Community at the Border of Washington, D.C. (2013)

    Locating Style: Style-Shifting to Characterize Community at the Border of Washington, D.C. (2013)

    Grieser, J. (2013). Locating style: style-shifting to characterize community at the border of Washington, D.C. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: 19(2), Article 10. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol19/iss2/10 Grieser (2013) looks into topically marked instances of style shifting in two African American speakers from the Washington, D.C. area in order to determine how individual speakers use patterns […]


  • “I ain’t Never Been Charged with Nothing!”: The Use of Falsetto Speech as a Linguistic Strategy of Indignation (2010)

    “I ain’t Never Been Charged with Nothing!”: The Use of Falsetto Speech as a Linguistic Strategy of Indignation (2010)

    Nielsen, R. (2010). “I ain’t never been charged with nothing!”: The use of falsetto speech as a linguistic strategy of indignation. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: 15(2), 111-121. https://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol15/iss2/13 This study examined the speech of a fourteen-year-old DC native named Michael with regards to his use of falsetto during the sociolinguistic interview. Nielsen aimed […]


  • Discourse on Southeast’s Bad Reputation: Positioning of African Americans in Washington, D.C.

    Discourse on Southeast’s Bad Reputation: Positioning of African Americans in Washington, D.C.

    Lee, S. (2018). Discourse on Southeast’s bad reputation: Positioning of African Americans in Washington, D.C. Discourse & Society, 29(4), 420–435. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926518778901 This study examines the interview discourse of five African American speakers in Washington, D.C., particularly paying attention to their discussions on issues surrounding a marginalized section of the city, namely, Southeast. The study provides […]


  • Ph.D Dissertations (as of 2016)

    Ph.D Dissertations (as of 2016)

    Lee, Sinae. 2016. Phonetic variation in Washington DC: Race, neighborhood, and gender. PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Grieser, Jessica. 2015. The language of Professional Blackness: African American English at the Intersection of Race, Place, and Class in Southeast, Washington, DC. Linguistics. Ph.D. dissertation, Georgetown University, Washington, DC. Nielsen, Rasmus. 2012. Reassembling ethnicity: Stylistic variation […]


  • The Stylistic Use of Prosodic Rhythm in African American English (2013)

    The Stylistic Use of Prosodic Rhythm in African American English (2013)

    Nielsen, R. 2013. The Stylistic Use of Prosodic Rhythm in African American English. RASK 37: 301-334. This article looks into prosodic variation in an individual speaker of African American English (AAE). Building off of prior studies that included the Pairwise Variability Index (PVI), which is a measure of whether a language variety is stress-timed or […]