Mil{lie/dred} Hacker

East Lansing, Michigan

hackermi@msu.edu

I'm a 1st-year linguistics PhD student at Michigan State University and an RA for the MI Diaries corpus project. I am interested in all things phonological variation, and compelled by the central question of how unmarkedness (function) gradually incorporates itself into the core grammar.

I am currently working on a quantitative investigation of the effects of style/register and speech rate on the emergence of non-standard features. My goal is to differentiate overlapping sources of variation and the respective roles they play in shaping outputs. The variable I'm focusing on right now is the (infamous) word-final ɪŋ/ɪn in English.

I'm from the East San Francisco Bay and did my B.A. at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where I majored in Linguistics and Environmental Studies. I was an undergrad RA on a Conversation Analysis project led by Prof. Kimberly Helmer and on an LLM Social Bias project led by Profs. Pranav Anand and Allison Nguyen. I've also done some formal work on variable patterns of nasality agreement in Hixkaryana.

Outside my academic life, I'm delightfully occupied with visual arts of all sorts and had the pleasure of co-coordinating Volumes 7-9 of Fruitcake art magazine in Santa Cruz. I also love to spend time running, dancing, hiking, biking (basically anything where I get to move my legs), baking, and exchanging letters with friends. I serve as a board member for the Spartan Housing Cooperative and work on the co-op's associated Pine Press newspaper.