Research

My research focuses on variation and change within the quotative system of Hawai'i English and Pidgin (Hawai'i Creole English).  I am interested in the ways Hawai'i Locals use both of these language varieties to construct and display their identities.  Using data collected from 42 sociolinguistic interviews, my work with colleagues at the University of Hawai'i shows a shift in apparent time towards be like in the quotative systems of both language varieties.  Additionally, we find that the language variety voiced in the quote can predict quotative choice.   

 

I am also interested in the syntactic development of bilingual children, and the shared syntactic representations of bilingual speakers.  I am currently investigating the Mandarin bei construction.  My experiments with priming this construction cross linguistically have shown that syntactic priming (Bock, 1986) may not be the only type of priming at play in cross language situations; the order of thematic roles may also have a priming effect.  This work appears in the Proceedings of the 13th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2015).

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My upcoming dissertation draws from both acquisition and variationist sociolinguistics; looking at how children acquire the quotative systems of Pidgin and English; systems currently undergoing change and in close contact with each other.  The quotative system of Hawai‘i English is undergoing changes similar to those observed in other studied varieties, namely, a shift in apparent time towards quotative be like.  In Pidgin however, quotative be like is used only by the youngest group of Pidgin speakers tested; precisely the cohort of speakers who are currently raising children.  My ongoing research seeks to examine how the children of these speakers acquire both their quotative systems, as well as the rich social information necessary to choose which quotatives to use in a particular social context.

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