Rachel Steindel Burdin’s research focuses on variation in intonation, particularly in Jewish languages and contact situations. Her dissertation, “Variation in the form and function of Jewish English intonation,” completed at The Ohio State University in summer 2016 and partially funded by a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, examined variation in the production, perception and social meaning of Yiddish-influenced intonation. This research, and her work more broadly, makes use of a wide variety of techniques, including participant observation, acoustic analyses, perceptual experiments and media studies in order to get a fuller picture of the range and nature of variation in intonation. Her research also looks at intonational meaning more broadly, including work with her colleague Joseph Tyler on the interpretation of rising and plateau contours in listing contexts, and, with colleagues at Ohio State, on the prosodic marking of focus in different languages, with results published in articles in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience and Lingua. Her other research interests include the use of Yiddish in the construction of Jewish identities and places, particularly in areas with smaller Jewish populations, and Slavic/Yiddish contact.
Courses Taught
- ENGL 719/819: Sociolinguistics Survey
- ENGL 752: History of English Language
- ENGL 852: History of English Language
- ENGL/LING 605: Intermediate Linguistic Analys
- ENGL/LING 719/819/719: Sociolinguistics Survey
- ENGL/LING 728/828/728: Language and Gender
- ENGL/LING 779/879/779: Linguistic Field Methods
- ENGL/LING 793/893/793: Phonetics and Phonology
- INCO 590: Student Research Experience
- INCO 790: Advanced Research Experience
- LING 695: Senior Honors
Research Interests
- Intonation
- Jewish English
- Language contact
- Phonetics
- Prosody
- Sociolinguistics
- Variation and change
- Yiddish
Selected Publications
Holliday, N., Burdin, R. S., & Reed, P. (2024). Can listeners differentiate varieties using prosodic information? Lect identification in a persona-matching task. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics, 9(1). doi:10.16995/glossa.10124
Clopper, C. G., Burdin, R. S., & Turnbull, R. (2023). Second dialect acquisition and phonetic vowel reduction in the American Midwest.. J. Phonetics, 99, 101243.
Burdin, R. S., Holliday, N. R., & Reed, P. E. (2022). American English pitch accents in variation: Pushing the boundaries of mainstream American English-ToBI conventions. JOURNAL OF PHONETICS, 94. doi:10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101163
Burdin, R. S. (2021). Hebrew, Yiddish and the creation of contesting Jewish places in Kazimierz. JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, 25(1), 81-102. doi:10.1111/josl.12451
Burdin, R. S. (2020). Prosodic Patterns in English Conversation. JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, 48(2), 208-212. doi:10.1177/0075424220913611
Burdin, R. S., & Tyler, J. (2018). Rises inform, and plateaus remind: Exploring the epistemic meanings of "list intonation" in American English. JOURNAL OF PRAGMATICS, 136, 97-114. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2018.08.013
Clopper, C. G., Turnbull, R., & Burdin, R. S. (2018). Assessing predictability effects in connected read speech. LINGUISTICS VANGUARD, 4. doi:10.1515/lingvan-2017-0044
Burdin, R. S. (2017). New Notes on the Rise-Fall Contour. Journal of Jewish Languages, 5(2), 145-173. doi:10.1163/22134638-05021184
Turnbull, R., Burdin, R. S., Clopper, C. G., & Tonhauser, J. (2015). Contextual predictability and the prosodic realisation of focus: a cross-linguistic comparison. LANGUAGE COGNITION AND NEUROSCIENCE, 30(9), 1061-1076. doi:10.1080/23273798.2015.1071856
Burdin, R. S., Phillips-Bourass, S., Turnbull, R., Yasavul, M., Clopper, C. G., & Tonhauser, J. (2015). Variation in the prosody of focus in head- and head/edge-prominence languages. LINGUA, 165, 254-276. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2014.10.001
