About Me
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with adjunct status in the Department of African, African American, and African Diaspora Studies. Broadly speaking, I’m interested language structure and variation. Most of my work focuses on the semantics of tense and aspect in dialects of American English, with a particular emphasis on African American English. Though difficult to define tense and aspect are, roughly speaking, natural language’s primary mechanisms for expressing temporal relations – i.e. notions such as past and present, progressive and completed. Although tense and aspect semantics constitutes the bulk of my work, my research employs a mix of methods and addresses a variety of issues including quantifying the use of style-shift in African American adolescents, the relationship between structural and social meaning, and, most recently, how dialectal difference affects AAE-speaking 2nd graders’ performance on tests of mathematical reasoning.