When I grow up...
There are lots of reasons why I'm not doing these pieces of research RIGHT NOW, and most of them are things like: I can't do everything at once / I don't think I'm skilled enough to do that right now / I think I need to develop that idea a bit more / I just have other priorities.
But these are some things that I'd like to, some time in the future, look into.
4-chan
"Meme"-development in 4-chan.
Standard "memes" (pictures, games, etc.), lexic, communication codes and practices.
(On one hand, I do wonder if I should start collecting this corpus before it gets too late (outdated)...)
Forensic linguistics
This was what I wanted my dissertation project to be on (sort-of). What are the distinguishing features of a given person's (written) discourse?
A study on linguistic variation and social identity in the island of Jersey
The island of Jersey is 45 square miles of linguistic diversity.
Kids are born there, grow up there, and by the time they're 15 or 16 might be speaking like they're from Oxford, London, Brighton or Manchester; like they've just come off a beach in Australia or off a TV show in America.
I'm pretty sure this is a phenomenon that exists elsewhere (any given region of the UK, maybe?) but the small, contained, geography, and (it seems to me) lack of a stereotypical, or at least fairly representative sociolect (as you might have in Yorkshire) seem to make it an interesting potential object of study.
In 'sociolect' I'm including accent.
There is a 'Jersey' accent, but it's rare to hear on anyone under the age of 50.
Although, back in the day, a slightly different version of Jerrais was spoken in Gorey (East) from St Ouen (West), the differences today in English are not geographical.
Y'see, there's two (main) parts to this question: accent and lexic. And as fascinating as accent is (for me: generally just in the way of "wow, I love that accent") I'm really not a phonologist of phonetician. I struggle with doing IPA notation - I'm pretty sure I don't have the "ear" and would be pretty terrible at doing transcription.
The lexical part would be great, but maybe it would be even better if it was teamed with someone else (doing the accent part).
Still - there are a lot of preliminary issues. What factors to take into consideration in defining social identity? What corpus to take? How? (Given that the phenomonens studied will vary by situation - who is the speaker talking to, when/why?)
A non-trivial question: would anyone fund this research? Given the attitude of some, it seems difficult to imagine...
