Roslyn Burns

Lecturer

roslyn.burns@yale.edu

Roslyn is a historical phonologist and sociolinguist. Her focus is on language change in situations characterized by language contact and delineating which phenomena can be attributed to contact vs language internal processes. Some of her research involves gathering data through fieldwork while other research is focused on formal modeling of linguistic innovations. She currently works on West Germanic and West Slavic. In the past she has worked on Bantu.

Research Areas:

Phonology, Historical Linguistics

Courses

Term: Fall 2021

LING 102 - Introduction to Language and Religion

This survey course examines topics related to how language structures intersect socially with concepts related to religion. Students develop tools to talk about how linguistic form and meaning reflect different properties of religion through building their knowledge of linguistics literature. Students demonstrate their ability to synthesize their own novel research that expand on current lines of research.

1 credit for Yale College students

Term: Fall 2021

Day/Time: Monday & Wednesday 11:35a -12:50p

More info: Yale Online Course Information

Term: Spring 2021

LING 205/605 - Introduction to Sociolinguistics

This course considers the inclusion of social aspects of language use in linguistic inquiry— the dialogue between langue and parole. This course is presented as a survey of the central themes in the study of language and culture and their change over time. We explore theoretical notions (facework, power, ideology, indexicality, social meaning), methodologies for gathering sociolinguistic data (variationist/quantitative sociolinguistics, ethnography, discourse analysis), perspectives on sociolinguistic analysis at the level of the group (speech communities, communities of practice, social networks) and the individual (style, audience design, social practice), and threads of inquiry (ethnicity, gender, third wave sociolinguistics).

A basic introduction to sound systems in linguistics is helpful.

This course can be applied towards the Social Sciences Yale College distributional requirement.