language, media, and popular culture
Generally speaking, I’m most interested in how consumers and producers of pop culture and mass media use language as a semiotic resource for accomplishing different kinds of interactional goals, as well as how these processes shape broader language ideologies. Several lines of my work address this interest.
- Dissertation: Language Use and Global Media Circulation Among Argentine Fans of English-Language Mass Media (2019)
- This work brings together lines of research in linguistics, anthropology, and various other social sciences in an effort to understand how global media circulation shapes the way that people use and think about language on a local level. To do this, I study the linguistic practices of Argentine fans of English-language mass media in both online and offline contexts. I collected linguistic and other semiotic data from several digital communities, including Facebook groups that connect predominantly Spanish-speaking Argentine fans of various English-language media products and Tumblr.com, a blogging website which is a major area for fandom-related activities on the Internet and a predominantly English-medium space; and Argentine fan accounts on both Twitter and Instagram. In 2018, I conducted fieldwork in Buenos Aires to collect offline data from members of these communities, as well as Argentine fans of English-language media whose fandom lives are not so strongly tied to online communities. This work will helps better understand how the relationships between language, identity, and community–central issues in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology–are changing in the face of increasing globalization and technological change.
- Publications related to this work:
- 2022. “Semiotic Disruption and Negotiations of Authenticity among Argentine Fans of Anglophone Media“. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology.
- 2020. “English and Bivalent Class Indexicality in Buenos Aires, Argentina”. Chapter in the digital edition of Handbook on the Changing World Language Map, eds. Stanley Brunn and Roland Kehrein. New York: Springer.
- Selected presentations related to this work:
- Publications related to this work:
- This work brings together lines of research in linguistics, anthropology, and various other social sciences in an effort to understand how global media circulation shapes the way that people use and think about language on a local level. To do this, I study the linguistic practices of Argentine fans of English-language mass media in both online and offline contexts. I collected linguistic and other semiotic data from several digital communities, including Facebook groups that connect predominantly Spanish-speaking Argentine fans of various English-language media products and Tumblr.com, a blogging website which is a major area for fandom-related activities on the Internet and a predominantly English-medium space; and Argentine fan accounts on both Twitter and Instagram. In 2018, I conducted fieldwork in Buenos Aires to collect offline data from members of these communities, as well as Argentine fans of English-language media whose fandom lives are not so strongly tied to online communities. This work will helps better understand how the relationships between language, identity, and community–central issues in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology–are changing in the face of increasing globalization and technological change.
- Language use and uptake by media figures
- In 2022, I presented a paper at the Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis conference exploring ‘first’ and ‘early’ comments in response to celebrity and influencer social media posts.
- My work on Lady Gaga’s talk to and about her fans on various media platforms shows how a public figure can use different semiotic strategies in different communicative contexts (i.e., interviews with journalists, social media posts) to achieve the same rhetorical goals. It also advances sociolinguistic theories of stance by illustrating how and when strongly agentive interpretations of stance are most useful.
- 2021. “I’m just a rock star/I’m just a guy: gender and interactional non-compliance in Lady Gaga/Jo Calderone’s public personae. Paper and slides presented virtually at the 11th Annual International Gender and Language Association Conference.
- 2018. “Stance and the construction of authentic celebrity persona”. Language in Society 47(5): 715-740.
- In 2020 I wrote a short piece for Anthropology News about the celebrity gossip Instagram account Comments by Celebs and the authentication of celebrity personae through “ordinary”-seeming language use on social media.
- In collaboration with my ANLI colleague Jessica Ray, I investigated how the news media responds to “manifestos” written by perpetrators of mass shootings.
- Paper presented at the 2016 American Anthropological Association Meeting.
Dominican Spanish: Variation and ideologies
- Differential Object Marking variation: I used quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate whether cases of a + motion verb, which some speakers of Dominican Spanish had rated as equally grammatical with and without the a marker, would be better analyzed as dative prepositions, or whether this phenomenon should be considered part of the ongoing changes in differential object marking in Caribbean Spanishes more broadly. Elicitation and surveys work indicates that, even in the context of motion verbs, speakers continue to draw on the semantic features traditionally associated with differential object marking, offering further insight into the ongoing change in the object marking system of Dominican Spanish.
- Language ideology and conversation: While working with my consultants for my MA paper, I collected some fascinating conversational data where my participants used implicature and code-choice to construct ideologies about different dialects of Spanish in conversation.
Speciality Coffee Talk
- With my ANLI program colleague, Bill Cotter, I have investigated how language is used in speciality coffee discourse (barista talk, corporate writing, and advertisements). Our work has shown how issues of whiteness and class are transformed through the way drinkers talk about the sensory experience of consuming coffee, and the way coffee roasters and shops write about where and how coffee is grown.
Arizona vowels
- Dr. Lauren Hall-Lew, Mirjam Eiswirth, Bill Cotter and I collaborated on a project about vowel change in Arizona English. Our research suggests that the so-called ‘Californian’ front vowels have been present in the speech of English-speaking Arizonans for much longer than previously thought. We presented this work at NWAV 44 in Toronto, and the paper is available below: