School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 151-160 of 331 Results
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John Rickford
J. E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am a variationist sociolinguist (someone who studies language variation, often quantitatively, in relation to society and culture). I’m interested in understanding the relations between language variation, social structure and meaning, and language change, from descriptive, theoretical and applied perspectives.
A lot of my work has been devoted to understanding the linguistic, social and stylistic constraints on specific linguistic variables, like the variation between Guyanese pronouns am, she, and her in “e like am” (deep creole, basilect) versus “e like she” (intermediate creole, mesolect) versus “He likes her” (standard English, acrolect). Or, to take an American example, the variation between all and like as quotative introducers in “He’s all/like ‘I don’t know’.” But I’ve also been concerned with trying to figure out where such variables come from historically, and whether they represent ongoing or completed change. I’ve also used the data from specific variables to address larger methodological and theoretical concepts in sociolinguistics, like how best to conceptualize the speech community and analyze linguistic variation by social class and ethnicity, or to assess the role of addressee versus topic in style shifting or the validity of the hyothesis that linguistic and social constraints are essentially independent (in their effects, not frequencies).
My data come primarily from English-based creoles of the Caribbean (especially my native Guyanese Creole, but also Jamaican and Barbadian) and from colloquial American English (especially African American Vernacular English, but also, recently, from computer corpora, like Google newsgroup data). I’ve also been interested, increasingly since the 1990s, in how sociolinguistic research can be applied to help us understand and overcome the challenges that vernacular and creole speakers face in schools, where standard/mainstream varieties are expected. -
Cecilia Ridgeway
Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, Emerita
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am interested in the role that social hierarchies in everyday social relations play in the larger processes of stratification and inequality in a society. My research focuses on interpersonal status hierarchies, which are hierarchies of esteem and influence, and the significance of these hierarchies for inequalities based on gender, race, and social class.
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Tracey Riesen
Student Services Officer, Language Ctr
BioTracey is the Student Services Officer for the Stanford Language Center. She is responsible for all undergraduate and graduate student-related activities in the Language Center; this includes language advising, certification of the Language Requirement, academic records for the 6000 students who take foreign language courses each year, language credit transfers, and administration of the Advanced Proficiency Notation. She is the primary contact person for students, as well as for language program coordinators within the Language Center. She also manages the English for Foreign Students (EFS) summer intensive English program for incoming international graduate students and visiting scholars. She greatly enjoys being of service to Stanford students and values working in such a diverse and dynamic community.