HEATHER SUSAN BURNETTI am a Senior Research Scientist (Directrice de Recherches) at the CNRS, working in the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle at the Université de Paris. I have a PhD (2012) in Linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles and an HDR (2019) in Sciences du langage from the Université de Paris. My work involves describing new patterns of structure, meaning and communication in natural languages, and then developing new mathematical tools for analyzing them. Much of my research has focused on classic topics in natural language semantics, such as quantification, vagueness, gradability and negation; however, my more recent work studies properties of social meaning and sociolinguistic variation with a view to constructing an empirically well-founded, mathematically explicit and computationally implemented theory of identity construction through language. So far, my work in this area has been centered around the linguistic construction of regional, gender and sexual identity in France and Canada. Although the tools and frameworks that I develop aim to capture aspects of the full range of human languages, my theoretical ideas are often first informed by my own dialectological and sociolinguistic fieldwork studies of languages of the Gallo-Romance family: varieties of French spoken in Canada and in France, historical varieties of French (particularly Old and Middle French), and endangered Gallo-Romance languages, both Oïl varieties (esp. Picard and Normand) and Occitan varieties (esp. Languedocien and Limousin).
I am the PI of the ERC Starting Grant "Formal Models of Social Meaning and Identity Construction through Language" (SMIC). For more information about SMIC, please see http://www.socialmeaning.eu/index.html.