me

research keywords: experimental phonology, nasal vowels, phonological variation

I am an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal in the Département de linguistique & de traduction (linguistics and translation department), since December 2014. I have also worked at the Revue canadienne de linguistique/Canadian Journal of Linguistics as one of the co-editors since May 2022.

My specialization is in phonology, or the more abstract properties of what we use to convey human language. (In my case, this means sounds in spoken languages.) In particular, I use phonetic data (physical measurements) and/or corpus data (such as distributional information) to derive conclusions about larger systems.

My thesis focused on the system of nasal vowels in French and Picard, a regional language of the North of France, and how they differed. I have since worked on Québécois French using a similar approach. Some of my other work in this area proposes a formula for quantifying nasality in a way that abstracts away from temporal information.

I have also recently started researching phonological variation in Twitter corpora in a project called “Harnessing Twitter for morphophonological variation”. This research is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Insight Development grants). In general, we seek out patterns in the way people represent processes involving sounds – for instance, how often do people type “a apple” instead of “an apple”, and who are the people who do this the most? Ultimately, we want to compare phenomena that have been documented in more traditional corpora and compare our results with theirs. Since the untimely demise of the Academic API tier at Twitter, however, we are recalibrating the project to look at other data sources.

Other various things I’ve looked at include affrication in Québécois French, the implicit rules behind “-ussy” word formation, and the development of grammatical gender for the word “COVID” in several varieties of French.

I work primarily in the R language with tidyverse syntax and am in the process of revamping my work to make my results more interactive and reproducible, via Shiny dashboards and open-source code. Coming soon!