Shana Poplack

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Shana Poplack

CM FRSC
NationalityCanadian
Occupation(s)Linguist, University Professor

Shana Poplack,

African American vernacular English. She founded and directs the University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.[2]

Biography

Born in

Queens College and New York University, then lived in Paris for several years, studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where she took her PhD (1979) under William Labov's supervision. She joined the University of Ottawa in 1981.[citation needed
]

Work

Poplack's work privileges the use of large-scale digitized databases of unreflecting, vernacular speech and variable rule statistical methodology. Much of her research has involved the empirical testing of popular opinions on language, particularly as pertains to received wisdom surrounding language 'quality' or 'purity'.

Language contact

Poplack's many studies on language contact (examining multiple language pairs) have demonstrated that borrowing has no lasting structural effects on a recipient language[3] and that many changes attributed to language contact can be alternately explained by internal language change.[4]

During three years as a researcher at the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños, City University of New York, her studies of code-switching among Puerto Ricans in New York[5] initiated her characterization of universal patterns of intrasentential language mixing, and demonstrated that fluent code-mixing is a bilingual skill rather than a defect. Over three decades, she made numerous contributions to the understanding of bilingual syntax in social context, many involving typologically contrasting language pairs.[6] Recent projects (2008) focus on the question of contact-induced change in English where it is a minority language (e.g. Quebec anglophones).

Standard French

Much of Poplack's recent work investigates the question of whether the grammatical prescriptions of Standard French are stable, invariant, and consistent.[7]

Corpora

In 1981, Poplack moved to the University of Ottawa, where she assembled, transcribed, and concordanced a mega-corpus of informal conversations among French speakers in the Canadian national capital region, providing her and many other researchers with an extraordinary research resource on contemporary vernacular French.[8]

Historical and comparative studies

Poplack's analyses of vernacular varieties of New World Spanish,[9] Canadian French[10] and English,[11] and Brazilian Portuguese[12] are characterized by skepticism towards standard explanations of variation and change based on language simplification or external influences, in favour of historical and comparative studies of internal evolution.

Diasporic English

Poplack's work on the origins of African American Vernacular is based on evidence from elderly descendants of American slaves recorded during fieldwork in isolated communities in the

Samana English)[13] and in Nova Scotia.[14] This showed widespread retention of syntactic and morphological features (including the entire tense and aspect system) from earlier British and colonial English, contrary to previous theories attributing such features to a widespread early American creole.[15]

Current projects (2008) focus on contact-induced change in English as a minority language and the role of the school in impeding linguistic change.

Awards and honours

Shana Poplack was elected a Fellow of the

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,[16] and the André-Laurendeau Acfas prize (2019).[17] She was elected fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (2009),[18] was named a Member of the Order of Canada in 2014,[19] and, in 2017, was named Doctor of Letters (honoris causa) of University College Dublin
.

Publications

Poplack's major publications include Instant Loans, Easy Conditions: The Productivity of Bilingual Borrowing (1998), a special issue of the

ISBN 9780190256388
).

References

  1. ^ Herk, Gerard (2001). "Shana Poplack" in Concise Encyclopedia of Sociolinguistics (ed. Mesthrie, Rajend, Elsevier: 901)
  2. ^ "Sociolinguistics Laboratory". University of Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory.
  3. ^ Poplack, Shana (2018). Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  4. ^ Poplack, Shana; Levey, Stephen (2010). Auer, Peter; Schmidt, Jürgen Erich (eds.). Contact-induced grammatical change: A cautionary tale. Vol. 1 - Theories and Methods. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 391–419. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  5. ^ Poplack, Shana (1980) Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: toward a typology of code-switching. Linguistics 18: 581–618.
  6. ^ Poplack, Shana (2004) Code-Switching. In Ammon, U., N. Dittmar, K.J. Mattheier and P. Trudgill (eds), Sociolinguistics. An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 2nd edition. Pages 589-596.
  7. S2CID 34477335
    .
  8. ^ Poplack, Shana (1989) The care and handling of a mega-corpus. In Fasold, R. and D. Schiffrin (eds), Language Change and Variation. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Pages 411–451.
  9. ^ Poplack, Shana (1984) Variable concord and sentential plural marking in Puerto Rican Spanish. The Hispanic Review 52 (2): pages 205–222.
  10. ^ Poplack, Shana & Anne St-Amand (2007) A real-time window on 19th century vernacular French:The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois. Language In Society 36:5. Pages 707-734.
  11. ^ Poplack, Shana, Walker, James & Malcolmson, Rebecca (2006) An English “like no other”?: Language contact and change in Quebec. Canadian Journal of Linguistics. Pages 185–213.
  12. ^ Poplack, Shana, & Malvar, Elisabete (2007) Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change. Probus 19:1: pages 169–199.
  13. ^ Poplack, Shana & Sankoff, David (1987) The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean. American Speech 62 (4): pages 29l-314.
  14. ^ Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali (1991) African American English in the diaspora: Evidence from old-line Nova Scotians. Language Variation and Change 3: pages 301–339.
  15. ^ Rickford, John (1998) The creole origins of AAVE: Evidence from copula absence. In Mufwene, S., Rickford, J.R., Bailey, G. and Baugh, J. (eds) African American English. London: Routledge.
  16. ^ "SSHRC 2012 Gold Medal for Achievement in Research". The Social Sciences and Reserarch Council of Canada. 11 May 2012. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
  17. ^ "Découvrez les lauréats et lauréates 2019". Retrieved 15 November 2019.
  18. ^ "LSA Fellows by Year of Induction | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2023-02-24.
  19. ^ "Order of Canada Appointments". June 30, 2014. Retrieved March 2, 2022.

External links

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