Dr. Alexandra D'Arcy

Alex D’Arcy is a Professor in Linguistics and the Director of the Sociolinguistics Research Lab (SLRL) at the University of Victoria. She has a BA in English Language from the University of British Columbia, an MA in Linguistics from Memorial University of Newfoundland, and a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Toronto. She taught at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand for four years before joining the Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria in 2010.

Alex specializes in the study of language variation and change. Her research combines quantitative modeling with her interests in theoretical linguistics; she has published on lexical, phonological, syntactic, morphosyntactic, and discourse-pragmatic variation and change, both synchronic and diachronic. Her research centers on English, and she has worked on a range of varieties (national, regional, social, and ethnic). Her current project examines how children participate in advancing language change. She is also engaged in a number of collaborative projects with researchers in North America and abroad. These projects examine a range of research questions, from acoustic analysis and description to the social reflexes of syntactic variation. 

Alex's interests draw from a range of linguistic subfields and are driven by her focus on principled, accountable, and theoretically relevant explanation. The overarching theme of her work concerns the operation of the variable grammar (linguistic and social conditions on variability, development, embedding, globalization, localization).

Visit Alex D’Arcy’s website for more information about her research, her students, and the SLRL.

Alex D'Arcy's Faces of UVic Research video