Linguistics Research

My core linguistics research examines topics related to linguistic variation, with a particular focus on negation (e.g., n’t and the nuthin in the comic above–click here to see my TED talk featuring this comic) using a range of data types and methodologies. Because all human languages have ways of marking negation, and because these are diverse and often complex, this turns out to be a very rich topic. I’m interested in:

  • how languages are structured to yield different form and meaning pairs (syntax and semantics),
  • how pronunciation affects meaning (prosody),
  • how discourse context shapes our understanding (pragmatics),
  • how vernacular features are employed in Central PA (more on this project here), and
  • how monolingual and bilingual children acquire language, and what it means to know more than one dialect of a language.

More broadly, I’m interested in distinguishing natural (grammatical) from social forces shaping language behaviors, and in the relationship between cognitive processes and theoretical models of language.

The methods I’ve used to investigate these topics include:

  • eye-tracking while reading
  • comprehension and acceptability judgment tasks
  • quantitative and qualitative analysis of acoustic production
  • quantitative and qualitative analyses of natural language corpora
  • elicited production/repetition

My 2015 thesis on negation can be downloaded here. A large portion of my thesis data come from The Audio-Aligned and Parsed Corpus of Appalachian English, which I helped to create with my PhD supervisor Christina Tortora. This ~1 million word corpus is publicly available, and can be found here.

My interest in linguistic diversity has led me to study the many interesting features used in and around Central Pennsylvania. If you’re interested in learning more and possibly participating in this research, you can sign up here.

Some representative papers (for a full list see my CV):

Blanchette, Frances, Paul Reed, Erin Flannery, & Carrie Jackson. 2023. Adaptation at the syntax-semantics interface: Evidence from a vernacular construction. Language and Speech. (available online here)

Sandberg, Chaleece, Frances Blanchette, and Cynthia Lukyanenko. 2022. Comprehension of vernacular features in aphasia. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research: 1–18. (available online here)

Blanchette, Frances, Paul Reed, Erin Flannery, & Carrie Jackson. 2020. Linguistic diversity in Appalachia: The case of Negative Auxiliary Inversion. American Speech 95: 297-320. (available online here)

Blanchette, Frances & Cynthia Lukyanenko. 2019. Asymmetries in the acceptability and felicity of English negative dependencies: Where Negative Concord and Negative Polarity (Do Not) Overlap. Frontiers in Psychology. (available online here)

Blanchette, Frances & Cynthia Lukyanenko. 2019. Unacceptable grammars? An eye-tracking study of English Negative Concord. Language and Cognition. (available online here)

Blanchette, Frances & Chris Collins. 2018. On the subject of negative auxiliary inversion. The Canadian Journal of Linguistics 64: 1-30.

Blanchette, Frances & Marianna Nadeu. 2018. Prosody and the meanings of English negative indefinites. Journal of Pragmatics 129: 123-139.

Blanchette, Frances, Marianna Nadeu, Jeremy Yeaton, and Viviane Déprez. 2018. English Negative Concord and Double Negation: The division of labor between syntax and pragmatics. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America 3.53: 1-15.

Blanchette, Frances. 2017. Micro-syntactic variation in English Negative Concord. Glossa: A journal of general linguistics 2: 1-32.

Blanchette, Frances. 2016. Subject-object asymmetries in the acceptability of English sentences with two negatives. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 22: 41-50.

Blanchette, Frances. 2016. English Negative Concord and Double Negation: Applying the framework of Collins and Postal 2014. In NELS 46: Proceedings of the Forty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society: Volume 1, eds. Christopher Hammerly & Brandon Pickett, 107­–122. Amherst, MA: Graduate Linguistics Student Association (GLSA).

Blanchette, Frances. 2013. Negative Concord in English.  Linguistic Variation 13: 1–47.

Blanchette, Frances and Ignacio Montoya. 2013. Using elicited repetition to test copula knowledge in bilingual and monolingual two-year olds. In BUCLD 38 Online Proceedings Supplement, eds. Will Orman and Matthew James Valleau. http://www.bu.edu/bucld/supplementvol38/

Blanchette, Frances. 2013. Approaching pragmatics: An analysis of data from Dutch and Italian child language. In Advances in Language Acquisitioneds. Stavroula Stavrakaki, Marina Lalioti, and Polyxeni Konstantinopoulou, 32­–43. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

 


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