Alex D’Arcy is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics and the Director of the newly formed Sociolinguistics Lab at the University of Victoria. She has a BA in English Language from the University of British Columbia, an MA in Linguistics from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto. She taught at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand for four years before joining the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria. Alex is a sociolinguist by training and specializes in the study of language variation and change. Her research combines quantitative modeling with her interests in theoretical linguistics; she has presented and published on lexical, phonological, syntactic, morphosyntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, both synchronically and more recently, historically. Her research centers on English, and she has worked on a range of varieties (national, regional, social, and ethnic). She is currently engaged in a number of collaborative projects with researchers in Canada, England, and New Zealand. These projects examine a range of research questions, from acoustic analysis and description to the social reflexes of syntactic variation. Her interests draw from a range of linguistic subfields and are driven by her focus on principled, accountable, and theoretically relevant explanation. The overarching theme of her work concerns the operation of the variable grammar (linguistic and social conditions on variability, development, embedding, globalization, localization).

Click here for Alex's personal Webspace @ UVic.

Selected Recent Publications - click to view/hide