Dr Emma Moore
BA (Manchester); MA (Manchester); PhD (Manchester)
Room 5.03, Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Internal extension: 20232
Phone number: +44 (0)114-222-0232
email : e.moore@sheffield.ac.uk
I joined the department as Lecturer in Sociolinguistics in February 2004, following a temporary lectureship at the University of Manchester. My PhD research (entitled Learning Style and Identity: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of a Bolton High School) was also completed at Manchester; however, during the course of my studies, I also spent an academic quarter at Stanford University, USA, where I worked under the supervision of Penny Eckert. Whilst at Stanford, I studied in the departments of Linguistics, Feminist Studies and Social and Cultural Anthropology. I maintain links with Stanford University, most recently collaborating with Stanford alumnae, Robert J. Podesva (http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/rjp39/) (now Assistant Professor at Georgetown University).
Research
My research is concerned with the social meaning of linguistic variation. There are three questions which my work seeks to address:
- Where is social meaning located?
- What units are used to make social meaning?
- What is the connection between social meaning and larger socially meaningful units like identity and gender?
Like other sociolinguists who work in (what Penelope Eckert has called) third wave sociolinguistics, I believe that social meaning is located in styles. Current work on style has tended to focus on upon a particular dimension of variation (usually phonological) and has analysed it in its full ethnographic context. My work (Moore 2003, 2004) complements this existing work by focusing upon syntactic aspects of variation; in particular, exploring how adolescents use these linguistic features to construct socially meaningful identities. In my current work (on-going with Robert Podesva), I have started to think about discourse context too – considering how linguistic features are meaningful not just by virtue of social context, but by virtue of their linguistic design too. Rob and I have been looking at tag questions and exploring how different groups of speakers `design´ their tags in socially meaningful ways using a combination of topic choice, discourse shape and phonetic and syntactic properties. I reported on this research at my recent UKLVC6 plenary at Lancaster University.
Most sociolinguistic research has focused on homogeneous speech communities, but one of my major interests is in how fluid and heterogeneous communities manage community-specific identities. I´m currently working on a Knowledge Transfer project on the Isles of Scilly which will allow me to explore these issues. Scilly is very interesting from a sociolinguistic perspective. It has a history of fishing and farming but tourism is now its main industry. This makes the community very unstable - on the one hand, it attracts seasonal workers and migrants, and, on the other hand, many `natives´ leave to find employment and housing. This fluidity has inevitably impacted on the language used on the islands. By combining ethnography with historical research, I´ll be exploring exactly how language use has been affected by this social context.
Publications/outputs:
- -- (2006) “‘You tell all the stories’: Using narrative to understand hierarchy in a Community of Practice”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10: 611-640.
- -- (2004) “Sociolinguistic style: A multidimensional resource for shared identity creation”. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 49: 375-396.
- -- (2003) Learning Style and Identity: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of a Bolton High School. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Manchester, UK.
- -- (2006, with Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Penelope Eckert and Norma Mendoza-Denton) The Elements of Style. Poster presented at NWAV35. Ohio State University.
- -- (in preparation) “Peripheral members of communities of practice”. In: Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds.), Language and Identity. Edinburgh: EUP.
- -- (in preparation) “Social networks, Communities of Practice and Social class: What’s the connection?” Journal of Sociolinguistics.
- -- (in preparation, with Robert J. Podesva) “‘We do say, ’in he, don’t we?’: Using tag questions to explore social meaning and style”. Language in Society.
Teaching:
My teaching is research led and based in the area of Sociolinguistics (broadly defined). I co-convene (with Joan Beal) ELL110 Varieties of English at level 1, and ELL217 Sociolinguistics at level 2. At level 3, I convene ELL344 Language and Gender. At MA level, I co-convene (with Joe Bray) EGH603 Narrative, Style and Identity and convene Issues in Language Variation.
Connections:
I am a member of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) and the Half Moon Bay Style Collective (This is an international collective of 20 sociolinguists from 6 universities, organised by Penny Eckert with funding from the Spencer Foundation, and so named after the place of our first meeting. The Collective raises issues and proposes directions for the study of style and encourages collaborative work between its members.)
I have written for the BBC Voices website and appeared on BBC Radio. I also served as language consultant for the BBC´s Life on Mars series.
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