Mark Richard Lauersdorf
University of Kentucky
I am Professor of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky, where I work across the areas of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, language contact, and corpus linguistics, bringing them all together in historical sociolinguistic research. My interests in historical sociolinguistics encompass both macro- and micro- aspects of the field. I get particularly excited about historical language contact situations that exhibit high numbers of language varieties in contact; no standard language or prestige variety; a multitude of geographical and political borders; and rapidly changing socio-cultural, socio-political, socio-economic contexts. In these contexts I pursue and promote the refinement of theories and methods for data-driven corpus-based quantitative sociolinguistic investigation of historical language variation and user interaction, using statistical and visualization methods of data analysis to identify and correlate salient patterns in the linguistic and socio-historical data, seeking to identify "who used what linguistic features with whom, when, where, why, and how" as a means of investigating historical language use and historical linguistic identity. I was the initiator and one of the founders of the North American Research Network in Historical Sociolinguistics (NARNiHS) to promote the field and encourage its growth among new generations of linguists; and I have served as Visiting Professor or Researcher at the Technische Universität Dresden, the Univerza v Ljubljani, and the Université de Lausanne, as well as at two previous LSA Linguistic Institutes and the Summer School of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN).