Pragmatic markers help us navigate discourse and express our attitudes and cognitive states. Although Creoles contain an abundance of these highly multifunctional items, there is little work focusing on their usage in contact and minority languages. In my dissertation, I conducted an investigation of pragmatic markers in Kwéyòl Donmnik, an understudied French-lexifier and English-influenced Creole spoken by members of my family, in comparison with their French and English counterparts. I am now developing this work into three manuscripts for journal publication and preparing to build upon it by conducting further studies. This dimension of my research program merges pragmatics with creolistics, and my goal is to both expand our knowledge of multifunctional items cross-linguistically and deepen our understanding of language contact at the pragmatic level.

Through the development of this coauthored book, I am working alongside Kendra Calhoun, Aris Clemons, Anne Charity Hudley, and Christine Mallinson to create a resource that combines the linguistic experiences of Black faculty in linguistics and the language sciences with much-needed information that Black faculty across SBE (Social, Behavioral, and Economic) fields can draw upon as they navigate a career in higher education. This project is funded through the NSF Build and Broaden 2.0 Program, and we're using mixed methods to examine how linguistic, ideological, and identity-related factors shape Black faculty members' lives.