This weekend I'm attending NWAV 44 (New Ways of Analyzing Variation), where I will be giving a talk on the African American English verb of quotation talkin' 'bout. I'll have a post on that very soon.

I'm excited to see that it looks like someone else has noticed and operationalized the study of something I noticed a few years ago, but couldn't figure out how to get at: the interaction between affect and creaky voice. The paper is "Creak as disengagement: gender, affect, and the iconization of voice quality."

I'll have updates after the conference, as well as ton of new posts that are in the pipeline, inlcuding a run-down of talmbout/talkin' 'bout to introduce quotation, a discussion of recent work I co-authored on reduction in Mandarin, a tin-foil hat crazy speculation about French and Zulu.

I'm also going to experiment with blogging more, but shorter. I have a problem with wanting to put up long(ish) essays on subject matter I'm very confident about, and this means that shorter observations -- but ones that are more than 140 characters -- get ignored. Insofar as I'm also in the middle of finishing up 3 publications, have two qualifying papers to write, and still have homework for my courses, this also means I just don't blog. I'm going to try and change this.

I've already got the javascript working for interlinear glosses, and a lot of material to write up. Here's to the future!