My primary area of research is language variation and change. Most of my work has been on Canadian English(es) and has focused on discourse-pragmatic and morphosyntactic variation and change. For the last few years, including in my PhD thesis and during my postdoctoral work, I have been investigating earlier Ontario English in an attempt to understand the foundations of the relatively homogeneous General Canadian English dialect region that spans from The Ontario-Quebec border to Vancouver Island.

In addition to the sociohistorical aspect of this work, I am also deeply invested in understanding how language variation is structured in the human language faculty and what the cognitive mechanisms of linguistic change look like.  You can check out my list of publications to see how I’ve addressed these questions.

My current research looks toward the future rather than the past. In a series of interconnected projects, I am investigating the English by 1st, 1.5th, and 2nd generation Canadian adolescents in relatively linguistically- and culturally-diverse neighbourhoods in the Greater Toronto Area. My work picks up on similar work in European metropolises that have observed the development of multiethnolects in these neighbourhoods.