Chantal Gratton, PhD (Stanford)

Profile

I am a sociophonetician interested in interactional questions, focusing on how speakers make use of linguistics variation to navigate social structures, forge interpersonal relationships, and express emotional affect. I’ve taken a variety of (quant and qual) approaches to examine:

• 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

Teaching

• English in Use (UG)
• Research Methods in Linguistics (UG)
• Sociolinguistic Theory (PG)

Research

Research Interests:

• Interactional sociolinguistics
• Sociophonetics
• Affect and emotion
• Language and gender
• Stance and alignment
• Style and variation

Publications

Esposito, Lewis and Chantal Gratton. (2020). Prosody and ideologies of embodiment: Variation in pitch and articulation rate among fitness instructors. Language in Society, 51(2).

Karlgran, Jussi, Lewis Esposito, Chantal Gratton, and Pentti Kanerva. (2018). Authorship Profiling Without Using Topical Information: Notebook for PAN at CLEF 2018. In 19th Working Notes of CLEF Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, CLEF 2018. Avignon, France. Linda Cappellato, Nicola Ferro, Jian-Yun Nie, Laure Soulier (eds.) Vol. 2125. CEUR-WS.

Gratton, Chantal. (2016). Resisting the gender binary: The use of (ING) in the construction of non-binary transgender identities. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, 22(2).

In progress:

Gratton, Chantal. (R&R). Vowel space size as an interactional variable. Submitted to Language Variation and Change.

Gratton, Chantal. (In prep.). The indexical relationship between vowel space size and affective alignment. To be submitted to Journal of Sociolinguistics.