Graduate Research Supervision

PhD Supervisor / Co-supervisor

• Pocholo Umbal. A comparative variationist analysis of phonetic variation and change in Toronto Heritage Tagalog. 2019-2023.
• Olga Tararova (Department of Spanish & Portuguese). "Yo no hablo italiano no" Negative doubling in Chipilo, Mexico. 2013-2018.
• Shayna Gardiner. Yours, Mine, and Ours: What Ancient Egyptian possessives can tell us about language change and stable variation. 2015-2017.
• LeAnn Brown. Phonetic Cues and the perception of gender and sexual orientation, 2011-2014.
• Natalia Bakaeva (French Department). Aspects typologiques du mélange de codes: les paires russe-anglais et russe-français, 2009-2016.

PhD Committee member

• Robert Prazeres. Comparative sociolinguistic study of nominal genitives across Arabic varieties. 2018-.
• Vanina Machado Araujo (Department of Spanish & Portuguese). Cross-generational variation in Uruguayan border Spanish: the prosody of Spanish-Portuguese bilinguals in Rivera. 2018-2022.
• Julien Carrier. Ergativity on the move. 2017-2020.
• Emily Blamire. Guess Who: Linguistic and Social Factors of Voice Recognition. supervised 2017-2019; proposal approved December 2019.
• Tanya Battersby (Department of Spanish & Portuguese). The Speaker-oriented use of Estar: Semantic variation in the [Copula + Adjective] context in Buenos Aires Spanish. 2017.
• Marisa Brook. Syntactic categories informing variationist analysis: The case of English copy-raising. 2016.
• Holman Tse (University of Pittsburgh). Beyond the Monolingual Core and out into the Wild: A Variationist Study of Early Bilingualism and Sound Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese. 2015-2018.
• Derek Denis. The Development of pragmatic markers in Canadian English. 2014-2015.
• Bridget Jankowski, A variationist approach to cross-register language variation and change, 2009-2013.
• Cathleen Waters, Social and linguistic correlates of adverb variability in English: A cross-varietal perspective, 2011.

PhD Generals Paper supervisor

• Laura Griffin. Distinguishing Variation from Interference: An Investigation of Back Vowel Shifts in Heritage Seoul Korean. 2022-2023.
• Pocholo Umbal. Contact-induced change in Heritage Tagalog: Evidence from adjective intensification, 2019.
• Robert Prazeres. Variability of nominal genitives in Casablanca Moroccan Arabic. 2018
• Emilia Melara. This, that, and the other, it: Propositional anaphora in Toronto English, 2016-2017.
• Julien Carrier. Variation in three transitive constructions in Resolute Bay Inuktitut, 2014-2015.
• Joanna Chociej. Context over form: Factors affecting null subject use by Heritage Polish speakers in Toronto. 2010-2011.

PhD Generals Paper Committee member

• Kelly-Ann Blake. Jamaican English Vowel Space (title TBD), 2023-
• Robert Prazeres, Nominal and pronominal possessives in Moroccan Arabic, 2018.
• Angelika Kiss. Word order in Mbyá Guaraní. 2019.
• Pocholo Umbal, An acoustic analysis of /u/-fronting in second-generation Filipinos in Toronto, 2018.
• Shayna Gardiner. Prized Possessions: Variation in Ancient Egyptian Possessive Constructions, 2014.
• Marisa Brook. A peripheral view of a change from above: Prestige forms over time in a medium-sized community, 2014.
• Jim Smith. Phonetic Variation of Word-Final Stop Voicing in Toronto English, 2013.
• Jim Smith. Phonetic and Perceptual Variation of Word-Final Stop Voicing in Toronto English, 2012.
• Derek Denis. Innovators & innovation: Tracking the innovators of stuff in York English, 2011.
• LeAnn Brown. Sibilant Phonetic Microvariation and Gender: Incorporating Trans and Cis Speakers, 2011.
• Cathleen Waters. Actually, it’s more than pragmatics, it’s really grammaticalization, 2009.

MA Forum Paper / Thesis supervisor

• Nicholas Haggerty. Beyond the Rainbow Rhetoric: Sociophonetic Variation of Male Speech: Queer-Oriented and Non-Queer-Oriented Organizations. 2022-23.
• Abram Clear. Identifiably Italian: Acoustic features of the Toronto Italian Ethnolinguistic Repertoire. 2021-2022.
• Justin Leung. Directional motion event expression in Toronto Heritage Cantonese: A variationist sociolinguistic investigation. 2020-2021.
• Isabel Ladouceur-Seguin. Optimality Theoretic analysis of variable vowel harmony in Laurentian French. 2017-2018.
• Maksym Shkvorets. Variation in case marking in Toronto Heritage Ukrainian. 2015-2016.
• Beth Houze. Quantifying linguistic change: Subject pronoun doubling in Louisiana French over time. 2015-2016.
• Paulina Lyskawa. Variation in case marking in Heritage Polish. 2014-2015.
• Emilie LeBlanc. Clustering variants in Acadian French. 2013-2014.
• Isobel Marr. Imposition and Identity in Null Subject Usage: Contact effects among speakers of Chinese, Italian and Anglo background in Toronto (available through Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics), 2010-2011.
• Meghan Hollett. Null-subject variation in Heritage Russian in Toronto, 2009-2011.
• Lizzie DiGiacomo. The Phonetics of Canadian Raising in conversational speech, 2008-2010. (incomplete)

MA Forum Paper reader

• Julia Petrosov. The ‘Ult’imate Question: Variable Linguistic Patterns in League of Legends. 2023-2024.
• Christopher Legerme. Creole on the Cusp: Phonological Variation and Change in Haitian Determiners. 2020-2021.
• Gabrielle Dumais. What do they say in French? Non-binary gender expression in spoken Quebec French. 2019-2020.
• Savannah Meslin. It's all about how you feel and who you know: The effects of bilingual identity and social contact on the Voice Onset Time of Ottawa bilinguals. 2017.
• Lex Konnelly. Enriching sociolinguistic categories: Evidence from variation within the adjective phrase. 2016.
• Erin Brassel. Jewish Montrealers in Toronto A Study in Dialect Acquisition. 2012.
• Marisa Brook. Looks as if there's something interesting going on here: Comparative complementizers following perception verbs in Canadian English. 2011.
• Madeline Shellgren. Language and Ideology of Vermont High School Students. 2011.
• Jacqueline Peters, Generational variation in the speech of Jamaican-Canadians in Hamilton. 2009.

Independent studies

• Letizia Tesi. “Sono” o “Io sono”? Risultati preliminari sulle variabili linguistiche che concorrono alla caduta del pronome personale in italiano. 2015.
• Paolo Frascà. Use and perception of dialect. 2014.
• Yannis Koumarianos. Adjective suffixation across three generations of Italian-Canadians. 2013.

Graduate student work at other institutions supervised while at U of T

• Iuliia Rezvukhina. 2023-. Some phonetic features of Heritage Russian in Toronto. University of Manitoba, PhD Exam committee and Dissertation committee.
• Angela Cristiano. 2021. (r) in Heritage Calabrese Italian: Cross-generational nativeness. Università di Bologna, MA Thesis.
• Michael Iannozzi. 2018-. Les verbes et les pronoms sujets dans la variété ciociaro d’italien à Sarnia, University of Western Ontario, PhD dissertation.
• Holman Tse. 2016-2018. Beyond the Monolingual Core and out into the Wild: A Variationist Study of Early Bilingualism and Sound Change in Toronto Heritage Cantonese, University of Pittsburgh, PhD dissertation.
• Maria Parascandolo. 2011-2014. Morphological attrition in the Italian verb system. A study of three generations of Italian heritage speakers. Università di Salerno, PhD Dissertation (incomplete).
• Holman Tse. 2014-2015. Acoustic analysis of Heritage Cantonese vowels. University of Pittsburgh, PhD Qualifying paper.
• Timea Molnár. 2011. Cross-generational change in Heritage Hungarian. University of Szeged PhD student.
• Veronika Molke. 2011. Russisch als Migrationssprache – zum Russisch-Englischen Sprachkontakt in Kanada. Diplomarbeit, Justus Liebig University, Giessen.
• Jim Wood. 2011. The Phonetic status of short-a in Northern New England. Journal of English Linguistics 2:135-65. NYU.
• Villard, Sarah. 2009. Postvocalic /r/ in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. Paper presented at NWAV 38, Ottawa. University of New Hampshire.

Graduate research supervised at UNH

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Updated 31 January 2024