Gratton
Chantal Gratton

Chantal Gratton

(she/her)



I'm a doctoral candidate in Linguistics at Stanford University and I received my master's degree from York University.

I am interested in interactional sociophonetic questions, focusing on how speakers make use of linguistics variation to navigate social structures, forge interpersonal relationships, and express emotional affect. My work has examined:

  • non-binary transgender speakers' use of pitch to construct community and mark stances towards normative social ideologies
  • the semiotic link between prosody, the body, and forms of physical activity, evidenced by YouTube bodybuilders and yogis
  • the interactional potential for variation in vowel space size to mark common ground and construct closeness
  • how visceral affect complicates the relationship between vocalic variation and social meaning

Feel free to contact me at: gratton@stanford.edu
NWAV 48: Forests and Trees
10-12.10.2019
LSA 2019 Annual Meeting
03-06.01.2019
NWAV 47: Methods and Innovation
18-21.10.2018

Current Research

Affect and vowel space size

Affect plays an important role in the ebbs and flows of a variable's use throughout an interaction. Despite this, it remains under-theorized in sociolinguistic, though some recent proposals note the important of affect for linguistic variation (e.g., Eckert 2010; Podesva 2016). My current work examines affect in a way that provides insights into a thoroughly different type of social factor: 'visceral' feeling. To get at such social meanings, I examine variation in vowel space size using novel methods typically of research in affective sciences.

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