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Northwestern School of Communication
Tracy Conner

Tracy Conner is an interdisciplinary linguist who combines theories and methodologies from formal and socio-linguistics as well as sociology and psychology to address issues of linguistic (in)justice and (in)equity. As an experimental syntactician, Conner studies the syntax and morphosyntax of African-American English and ellipsis phenomena. She’s interested in how theoretical descriptions of dialects of English can be extended to impact broader areas such as education, speech pathology and social justice for dialect speakers. A new stream of research focuses on describing the linguistic properties of gaslighting using tools from semantics and pragmatics as well as theories of language and power.