Marisa Brook |
Assistant Professor | ||
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About
The focus of my research is exploring what is occurring at the leading edge of change - where linguistic innovations emerge - and explaining the linguistic and social mechanisms that underlie it, particularly on the morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic levels. No single change to a language is at all isolated from linguistically proximal phenomena; however, equally, no single change to language is at all detached from the local sociocultural landscape, either. How to quantify these kinds of relatedness and determine the division-of-labour between them for a given linguistic change is the task ahead. I teach 4-5 classes per year, typically encompassing sociolinguistics, historical linguistics and introductions to the field. Student research that I have supervised has largely involved sociolinguistics, computer-mediated communication, and/or language and gender. | ||
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Personal My brain runs mostly on linguistics and iced tea. Aside from that, I might be reading, writing, composing music, doing digital art, making things out of fabric and yarn, or playing old video games. I've been on the staff of Damn Interesting (which is exactly what it sounds like) since mid-2006. I'm thrilled to be a 2003 alumna of the SHAD program for high-school students. My Erdős number is 4. I believe in knowledge and human rights, and thus stand with those actively engaged in dismantling pseudoscience, discrimination/bias, or (often) both at once. At no level of education is a conventional Western classroom accessible and welcoming in an equitable way. Linguistics as an academic field can and must do better to ensure representation of a mix of social groups and of languages. | ||
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Pronunciation of my first name Prescriptive: /mə'ɹisə/ Descriptive: Considerable variation. Attested alternative variants include /mə'ɹɪsə/ (exemplar effect), /'maɹsijə/ or /maɹ'sijə/ (metathesis), /'maɹʃə/ (metathesis and palatalization), /mə'ɹizə/ (intervocalic voicing), and the impressive /'mɔnjə/ (still unexplained). In other words, the way you pronounced it just now did not faze me (p < 0.01). | ||
