Dr Lisa Hilte; Visiting Fellowship 2022/23
I am a post-doctoral researcher in linguistics at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. My scientific domain is of an interdisciplinary nature and can best be described as ‘computational sociolinguistics’, which means that I try to bridge the gap between linguistics, sociology, and computer science. I use quantitative and digital methods (including automated feature extraction, statistical modelling, and machine learning) to examine large text corpora.
Both my pre-and postdoctoral work focuses on youth language and online language, e.g. on social media platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook. While teenagers’ social media writing is easily recognizable (containing emoji, spelling deviations, etc.), this does not imply that the genre is homogeneous, i.e., that all teenagers write in the same style. In my PhD research, I observed systematic patterns of sociolinguistic variation: distinct online writing by different groups of teenagers. Teenagers appear to have significantly different online writing styles (in terms of various linguistic features) depending on their gender identity, age, educational background, and social class. Furthermore, not only the teenagers’ own profiles influence their language use: their conversation partner plays a crucial role too. In my current research, I examine this phenomenon of ‘accommodation’: people adapting their language use to (that of) their conversation partner. Some of the research questions I try to answer are: Do teenagers write differently on social media when interacting with someone of the same versus the opposite sex? Which linguistic features are adapted and which remain stable? And do boys and girls meet each other ‘in the middle’, or is the linguistic adaptation asymmetric?
I first met professor Darja Fišer (INZ and University of Ljubljana) in 2016, at a conference she organized here in Ljubljana. I had just started my PhD then. Ever since we have kept in touch and over the years, we collaborated remotely on multiple occasions. In addition, I was honoured to have Darja as a member of my doctoral jury in 2019. This spring, I am visiting the INZ for six weeks to collaborate with Darja, Nikola Ljubešić (Jožef Stefan Institute and University of Ljubljana) and Bojan Evkoski (Jožef Stefan Institute) in the context of the newly founded research programme Digital Humanities. We are analyzing the CLARIN ParlaMint dataset, which contains parliament transcripts from 17 European countries. As a linguist, I am interested in how politicians speak in parliament. Which people ‘cluster’ linguistically, i.e. are most similar to each other in their language use? Are these the traditional demographic groups (e.g. women vs men, or younger vs older generations)? Or does the political setting overrule classical patterns, and do ‘political’ clusters emerge (e.g. left- vs right-wing politicians)?
I am excited to be working at the INZ and to get a taste of life in Ljubljana. Kind and intelligent co-workers, a beautiful city, and the mountains on the horizon... What an inspiring place!
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