‘complishments (fall 24 edition)
I was rounding up all my shit that I’ve done so far this academic year — I mean, it’s fall, so what I mean is “this semester” kinda, and this serves a couple purposes. First, it’s like, good for my brain because I have zero object permanence and regularly forget about entire papers while they’re on someone else’s desk. Second, it’s kind of validating to be like oh that’s why I’m so tired! (And then, uh, third, I guess I have to update my CV occasionally or whatever.)
So far this academic year, I’ve done three invited talks, and I have three refereed talks coming up in a couple weeks. I gave an invited talk at the University of Delaware, All Syntax Is Sociosyntax, where I interweave the theoretical implications of my sociosyntactic research on themself reflexives (with Byron Ahn) and findings of my research about syntax pedagogy (with the SynTeach team). It was super nice, and I loved that the discussion afterwards was almost equally weighted between the hardcore syntax questions and the big field-metacognitioning stuff about pedagogy. Then I went down to American University, where I was invited as the Hugo Mueller speaker for their new linguistics program; I gave my talk, Pronoun Euphoria, about my research on English neopronouns and implications for how linguists can work to pursue social justice. I also gave a version of this talk later in the semester at PSU Brandywine, where my fellow SEPTA member Evan Bradley invited me — that talk was to a room of non-linguistics faculty, and we had a wonderful and robust discussion, after which I got to sit in on Evan’s research methods class and chat with students about mixing qualitative and quantitative methodologies. I’m trying to put a limit on how many of these types of invited talks I give, and 3 in a single semester was technically over my limit, but they were all wonderful experiences and I do really love getting to meet a bunch of linguists in settings like these.
My upcoming refereed talks are all at the LSA annual meeting, which will be in Philly (yes!!!!) early January 2025. My talk with the SynTeach team — that’s Bronwyn Bjorkman, Caitl Light, and Laura Bailey — will be about our findings from a survey of syntax instructors, investigating whether instructors believe that there’s a “knack” or innate talent among syntax students. I’ll also be giving a talk with my amazing lab, the Socially Contextualized Syntax Lab (SoCS! 🧦🧦), in which we’ll discuss why a bunch of our survey participants started rating neopronouns as increasingly more natural-sounding over the course of the survey. Then I have a solo talk (literally in the same session, right after my SoCS talk, lmao) where I will be giving a semiotic-pragmatic analysis of what people are talking about when they refer to someone as “a they/she” and similar constructions. I’m PSYCHED for LSA this year, in huge part because it’s a “home game” so I don’t have to travel, and I get to make everyone try my favorite dim sum and everything while you all come visit ME. Hoo hoo!
Also under the “talks” section I did a couple small presentations here at Swarthmore. One was a little talk as part of an event I co-organized with Sibelan Forrester, nicknamed Pronoun-o-Ween (because it was on Halloween!); we had a panel of language experts and linguists from a typologically diverse array of languages discuss how morphosyntactic gender and pronouns worked in their language of interest. I was suuuuper excited that we were joined by Josh Raclaw, another SEPTA member, who talked about their research on nonbinary Yiddish. I can’t wait to hear more from them on that! And then also I did a teeny little guest lecture in my colleague Jonathan Washington’s Phonetics/Phonology class, giving the phon-phon students a very abridged run-down of sociophonetics.
Under papers, I have submitted two papers this fall: one was a first draft of a chapter on the pedagogy of formal subfields of linguistics for a volume on teaching and learning in linguistics, which is being done through MIT Press and edited by Jefferey Punske. A TON of my favorite folks are also in this volume, so keep your eyes out for when we have info on when that’ll be coming out! The other was the draft and revision of a short contribution to a special volumen of the Proceedings of LSA on teaching and learning in linguistics, with coauthors Jessi Grieser, Jamie Thomas, and Phil Duncan. I loved writing with them, a 4-author paper is so much fun, and we had the wonderful treat of getting to just talk about all the amazing work in the volume since we were the discussants. That’s already out, and you should read the whole volume! I also have listed a paper that was moooostly written by my student, Vic Wen, and I think I only barely earned my coauthor credit by trying to be helpful in revising and polishing a bit: it’s in the proceedings of Experiments in Linguistic Meaning (ELM), and will hopefully be out soon. It’s about how people adapt to nonbinary pronouns (they and neopronouns) in real time. Finally, I worked with my amazing coauthors from the UW Sociolinguistics Brown Bag group to revise and resubmit our manuscript about theorizing and collecting data on race and ethnicity in linguistics research. We started that paper back in 2019 or 2020, I honestly have lost track, and it’s been SO much work in part because it’s an enormous topic and condensing it to a reasonable paper length has taken a lot, but I am so so grateful and proud to have been a part of it and I can’t freaking wait for it to finally be published — maybe sometime in the new year, let’s hope.
I’ll mostly skip over the “teaching and mentoring” part of my list, except a very brief report. I was on a course release and so only taught one course this fall, Syntax 2, to an absolutely incredible group of 5 students who really knocked my ass clean off. They impressed me with their willingness to play ball as we developed and honed a sophisticated syntax theory, and they tackled advanced theory as we started delving more into the literature in the back half of the semester. It was the highlight of my week every week, and I am so grateful to these students for their deep and thoughtful engagement throughout, even when we were all kind of run ragged from everything going on in the world.
In my “service” section, I list that I’m “still technically” the outgoing chair of COZIL, because chairhood in LSA runs the calendar year rather than the academic year. I made it to…. a non-zero amount of COZIL meetings! I also joined Lal on the subcommittee to award COZIL’s inaugural travel awards (yay!!!), and contributed a blog post to COZIL’s new blog. I’m so grateful to Lal for being a very effective and productive chair, it’s made COZIL way less stressful. My on-campus service has been to sit on the Sager Fund committee, which is a Swarthmore thing where we get to fund events for LGBTQ speakers and issues on campus. It’s relatively chill as a committee assignment, and I love getting to give people money, so it’s been great. There’s one other very time-intensive thing on this section I can’t talk about yet, and then finally I included in this section my work to write the proposal for the Ling Department to ask the college for a tenure line in sociolinguistics. We need that tenure line really desperately, but there aren’t enough tenure lines to go around (as is always the case, it seems!), but I put several dozen hours into writing as strong a proposal as I possibly could. I really, really want them to give us that line, but even if we don’t get it, I will feel satisfied that I did all that I could, and we’ll try again next year.
Under my LingComm section, I list the fact that I organized Pronoun-o-Ween, which was absolutely a lingcomm event because a number of non-[linguistics students] attended and had wonderful questions and discussion. I also list that my piece for the Demystifying Language Project (DLP) is approved and releasing very soon, even though all I actually did to it this fall was copy-edits and little touch-ups to get it ready. I loved participating in the DLP and I’m very excited for all the contributions to be available! And then finally, I guess my COZIL blog post is lingcomm, sort of — but it is sort of aimed at linguists, giving tips on how to make a syntax classroom more LGBTQ affirming and inclusive.
Finally, I have an “in progress” section, which includes stuff I’m writing and stuff I’m still collecting and analyzing data on. There’s the neopronouns project, which I’m leading in my SoCS lab with some amazing undergrad collaborators; we’re still doing interviews and transcribing the interviews, and also still doing some ongoing analysis of the large acceptability surveys we ran in the past couple years. It’s a huge project, and I love keeping it circulating in conference talks because it will be a WHILE before we have a journal publication to give us that good good dopamine; I’ll keep you posted! The other huge project is the Themself/Themselves project, which is in collaboration with Byron Ahn and now we have newly recruited Lauren Ackerman to the team, and we are in the throes of doing math (again. more. still.) and we really, really hope to submit a manuscript of this giant thing sometime before the end of spring. Think good ggplot thoughts at us, please. And then the third huge project is the SynTeach project, which I also mentioned above; we’re still analyzing some aspects of the instructor survey, and getting ready to run a student survey VERY soon. If you are teaching syntax, let us survey your students!! And finally, I have a less-huge project in collaboration with Dan Grodner where we’re working on developing a better transphobia scale — I also have high hopes of having something shareable out of that less than a year from now, but we’ll see. Again, think Good Math in my direction, please! My other solo projects — my writing on misgendering, on depronominalizations, and my secret passion project with the weird relative clauses — have been mostly languishing this fall, but I hope to get back around to them once I get some other stuff off my desk. We shall see!
PHEW. That’s actually not all of it — aside from the service project above that I can’t talk about yet, there’s another big project I also can’t talk about quite yet. It is all I can do to not email the relevant parties once a week going “can I tell them yet? How about now? How about now???” Believe me, you will hear about them the second I am able to share, you will be sick of hearing about it, don’t even worry.
OKAY. So anyways. That’s why I’m tired! Holy shit!! I’m so excited to not work at all next week. I don’t know if I’ll do updates like this with any regularity, but if I do, they’ll probably be here on the Medium (until/unless I find somewhere better and move everything over, which is not in my immediate plans tbqh). For more bite-sized updates I will continue shitposting on bluesky, or you can become my friend irl and physically locate me and feed me baked goods in exchange for updates.
Abbreviations
- SEPTA: Scientific Explorations of Pronouns and Trans Acceptance, a multi-university consortium of linguist and linguist-adjacent folks working on trans & nonbinary pronoun stuff in the greater Philly area. Byron coined the acronym! Other PIs: Byron Ahn, Dan Grodner, Evan Bradley, and Josh Raclaw.
- COZIL: Committee on LGBTQ+ (Z) Issues in Linguistics, a committee of the Linguistic Society of America. Why does “Z” stand for LGBTQ? I cannot say.