Jerome Mwinyelle and I are currently investigating the use of adverbial clauses in relation to speaker gender. Our abstract from SECOL 2014 is here. It deals with adverbial clauses in social club meetings in English and experimental setting dyads in Spanish. We are now extending the analysis to Kate Beeching's Corpus of Spoken French.
Sapphire's novel Push tells a story more well known in its movie adaptation, Precious. In this study I use case grammar to see what the semantic role usage contributes to the construction of Precious and other characters and to the prominent theme of empowerment, particularly through language. An abstract I have submitted for a forthcoming conference is here.
Nüshu (女书) is a writing system used by some Chinese women of Hunan up until the last half of the 20th century. Though most of the writings in the script were lost, the ones remaining instantiate several genres, among them autobiographical writings. A prominent feature of the autobiographies is that they emphasize the misfortunes and suffering in the narrators' lives. Suzhen Li and I are analyzing these stories to determine to whom the women assign responsibility for their miseries and what linguistic techniques they use to do so.