Shana Poplack

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She is a Distinguished University Professor in the linguistics department of the University of Ottawa, where she directs the Sociolinguistics Laboratory and holds the Canada Research Chair in Linguistics.Born in Detroit, Michigan, and raised in New York City, she studied at Queens College and New York University, then lived in Paris for several years, studying with André Martinet at the Sorbonne before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, where where she took her PhD (1979) under Labov's supervision.

During three years as a researcher at the Centro de estudios puertorriqueños, City University of New York, her studies of code-switching among Puerto Ricans in New York [Poplack, Shana (1980) Sometimes I'll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español: toward a typology of code-switching. "Linguistics" 18: 581-618.] initiated her characterization of universal patterns of intrasentential language mixing, and demonstrated that fluent code-mixing is a bilingual skill rather than a defect. Over three decades, she made numerous contributions to the understanding ofbilingual syntax in social context, many involving typologically contrasting language pairs [Poplack, Shana (2004) Code-Switching. In Ammon, U., N. Dittmar, K.J. Mattheier and P. Trudgill (eds), "Sociolinguistics. An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society." Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 2nd edition.589-596.] .

In 1981 Poplack moved to the University of Ottawa, where she assembled,transcribed and concordanced a “mega-corpus” of conversations among French speakers in the Canadian capital region, providing her and many other researchers with an extraordinary research resource on modern vernacular French [Poplack, Shana (1989) The care and handling of a mega-corpus. In Fasold, R. and D. Schiffrin (eds), "Language Change and Variation". Amsterdam: Benjamins. 411-451.] .

Poplack's analyses of vernacular varieties of New World Spanish [Poplack, Shana (1984) Variable concord and sentential plural marking in Puerto Rican Spanish. "The Hispanic Review" 52 (2): 205-222.] , Canadian French [Poplack, Shana & Anne St-Amand (2007) A real-time window on 19th century vernacular French:The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois. "Language In Society" 36:5.707-734.] and English [Poplack, Shana, Walker, James & Malcolmson, Rebecca (2006) An English “like no other”?: Language contact and change in Quebec. "Canadian Journal of Linguistics." 185-213.] and Brazilian Portuguese [Poplack, Shana, & Malvar, Elisabete (2007) Elucidating the transition period in linguistic change. "Probus" 19:1: 169-199.] are characterized by skepticism towards standard explanations of variationand change based on language simplification or external influences, infavor of historical and comparative studies of internal evolution.

Poplack's work on the origins of African AmericanVernacular is based on evidence from elderly descendants of Americanslaves recorded during fieldwork in isolated communities in the Samanápeninsula (Dominican Republic) [ Poplack, Shana & Sankoff, David (1987) The Philadelphia Story in the Spanish Caribbean. "American Speech" 62 (4): 29l-314.

] and in Nova Scotia [Poplack, Shana & Tagliamonte, Sali (1991) African American English in the diaspora: Evidence from old-line Nova Scotians. "Language Variation and Change" 3: 301-339.] . This showed widespreadretention of syntactic and morphological features (including the entiretense and aspect system) from earlier British and colonial English,contrary to previous theories attributing such features to a widespreadearly American creole [Rickford, John (1998) The creole origins of AAVE: Evidence from copula absence. In Mufwene, S., Rickford, J.R., Bailey, G. and Baugh, J. (eds) "African American English". London: Routledge.] .

Current projects (2008) focus on contact-induced change in English as a minority language and the role of the school in impeding linguistic change.

Among her awards, she held a Fulbright visiting scholar award (1990) in Brazil, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1998) and won that society's Pierre Chauveau Medal (2005). She was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship in 2001 and the Killam prize in 2007, was the University of Ottawa Arts Faculty Professor of the Year (1999) and Researcher of the Year (2003), was awarded a Canada Research Chair in 2001, renewed in 2007. Poplack was elected Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (2009) and won a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship (2007) and the Ontario Premier’s Discovery Award (2008).

Poplack's works include "Instant Loans, Easy Conditions: The Productivity of Bilingual Borrowing" (1998), with Marjory Meechan, "The English History of African American English" (2000) and, with Sali Tagliamonte", African American English in the Diaspora" (2001).

References

External links

* [http://www.sociolinguistics.uottawa.ca/shanapoplack/index.html Shana Poplack's home page]
* [http://www.mri.gov.on.ca/english/news/PIA043008_bd4.asp Premier's Discovery Awards 2008]
* [http://www.centropr.org/documents/general_pdfs/PUBCAT%20LANGUAGEPOLICY.pdf Centro de estudios puertorriqueños]
* [http://www.trudeaufoundation.ca/trudeaufoundation?l=en Trudeau Foundation]