I’m thrilled to announce I’ve been accepted to present a paper at the 2017 annual conference of the American Dialect Society!
When I was an undergrad I was a part of a research team that presented at the LSA Annual Meeting in Boston in 2013. (I actually cut my honeymoon short so I could attend that meeting!) I was a starry-eyed budding little linguist with no real idea of what was going on. However, I do remember spending a large chunk of my time at that conference in the ADS presentations. In fact I still talk about some of the presentations I saw there.
Two years later, the LSA and its sister societies met in Portland. Being a short drive from where my wife grew up, we decided to fly out so she could see her family and so I could attend the conference. Again, I found myself almost exclusively attending the ADS meetings. (Part of that may have been that it was up on like the 23rd floor and the room had a fantastic view!) I recognized people from the Boston meeting (Tyler Kendall, Sali Tagliamonte, etc.) and was also able to put some faces to names I had read (Charles Boberg, David Bowie, etc.). As it turns out, there were several presentations on language in the West that I ended up citing in some of my own work.
Now, two years later, I’m extremely happy to be presenting at the 2017 meeting. Now that I have a clear idea about what my research interests are, and I know many more scholars’ works besides recognizing their name, I hope to reach out and talk with many of these people. Hopefully I’ll come across less of a fan and more as a colleague.
I get to present a portion of my data that I collected in Washington just a few months ago. In a nutshell I’m showing that in word lists people pronounce pull and pole the same but Mary and merry different, but in a minimal pair task, pull and pole are separate while Mary and merry are the same.
I’m about to give two completely unrelated presentations soon, so my focus hasn’t been on this Pacific Northwest, but once that wave has passed I’ll be able to devote more time and energy into this. It’s a very exciting time for me and I really look forward to the conference.