Research

On how cotemporal code-switching and musical style-shifting enable three Welsh popular music acts to construct shifting bilingual identities.

With Jessica Love-Nichols, a musicolinguistic analysis of eco grime and solarpunk music which shows how these genres reimagine "the club" as a space of sonic environmental activism, and convey environmental concerns and a 'sensorial sustainability' through both language and music.

On how linguists can help contribue to musical language revitalization through the creation of UTAUloids - singing synthesizers intended for low-resource, collaborative vocal music production - illustrated through a case study in ᏣᎳᎩ (Cherokee).

With Griselda Reyes Basurto, on integrating musical data into language documentation in ELAN, Praat, etc., and on the relationship between musical melody and linguistic tone in Tlahuapa Tù'un Sàví (Mixtec, Guerrero).

Musicolinguistic study of how vaporwave is constructed as a genre through both music and (spoken and visual) language, and how specific musical production techniques license imagined musicolinguistic landscapes in the minds of listeners, allowing them to experience the genre's central themes.

With James Crayton, on the narrative role of the multilingual (English, Māori, and Japanese), multimodal linguistic landscape in the photography-based videogame Umurangi Generation, and introducing the concept of ‘ludolinguistic landscapes’ – virtual linguistic landscapes as shaped by and experienced through the affordances of interactive gameplay.

With Emi Boonin, on the imaginary possibilities of waterscapes represented in the 2002 Japanese manga Aria, and how its setting of 'Neo-Venezia' reimagines the Venetian aquapelago through solarpunk, Slow Life sustainability, and both Venetian and Japanese cultural practices. We draw on the manga (in Japanese and English translation), as well as reader commentaries in Japanese, Italian, and English, to explore how Neo-Venezia is constructed and interpreted as model for a utopian imagined future in the face of climate change.

With Daphne Iskos, a study using methods from sociocultural linguistics and comic studies to show how differences in the use of loanwords, honorifics, onomatopoeia, and iconicity in each of two translations of Sailor Moon serve to either erase (in the case of the earlier release) or actively construct (in the case of the later) the sociocultural construct of 'Japaneseness' within the text.

Sociophonetic study which shows how bundles of phonetic features are used in anime to create equivalence between a physical characteristic – in this case, the main character's fatness – and a sociocultural category – here, her status as a fujoshi (a female fan of media depicting homoerotic male relationships), contrasting both of these against performances of traditionally desirable anime femininity.

Corpus study using linear mixed-effects modeling, showing that Patagonian speakers produce the voiceless stop series /p t k/ with lower average VOT values than speakers from Wales, as a result of contact with Spanish.

Corpus study using conditional inference trees and random forests, showing that for both Patagonian and Welsh speakers, the geographical and cultural ‘Welshness’ of placenames affect their mutation behaviour following yn ‘in’, and that soft mutation has become an important component of this prescriptively nasally-mutating environment.