Hi, I'm a linguistic anthropologist interested in the strategies humans deploy to imbue signs with sense, and the shared cultural, sociological, and cognitive priors that allow them to do so. My Ph.D thesis supervised by Julien Longhi and defended in December 2023, proposes a typology of 6 usages of non-standard minuscules in digitally mediated communication, in particular the non-standard 1SG. It draws on a wide interdisciplinary and theoretical base, applying notions such as prosody, indexicality, enregisterment, and iconicity, and combining them with elements of cognitive theory and social psychology to provide a usage profile for each of the six taxa. Jury member and examiner Julie Neveux (Sorbonne) remarked "la thèse soumise par Sophia Burnett est bienvenue car elle contribue à ce domaine scientifique en plein développement"/"The thesis submitted by Sophia Burnett is a welcome contribution to this rapidly developing scientific field". And Jürgen Spitzmüller (Vienna) wrote "The thesis is a very valuable contribution to grapholinguistics, the sociolinguistics of writing and research into digitally mediated (meta-)discourse."
My current position is Post-Doctoral Teaching and Research Associate (ATER) at the Université de Lorraine. For my research there I am affiliated with IDEA laboratory,Nancy. I am also affiliated with Laboratoire AGORA, CY Cergy Paris.
Research profile
Disciplinary anchors – Linguistic anthropology; computer-mediated discourse analysis; usage-based linguistics (UBL); general linguistics; cognition.
Preferred approaches – A mixed-methods approach combining quantitative, experimental, and introspective methods for the analysis of situated corpora, with triangulation integrating formal and theoretical linguistics.
Specialist themes – communicative attenuation; identity; stance; reflexive function; embodiment; social semiotics; morphology; graphophonology; enregisterment; metapragmatics.
Disciplinary anchors – Linguistic anthropology; computer-mediated discourse analysis; usage-based linguistics (UBL); general linguistics; cognition.
Preferred approaches – A mixed-methods approach combining quantitative, experimental, and introspective methods for the analysis of situated corpora, with triangulation integrating formal and theoretical linguistics.
Specialist themes – communicative attenuation; identity; stance; reflexive function; embodiment; social semiotics; morphology; graphophonology; enregisterment; metapragmatics.
Previously
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Classically trained, I was a professional dancer for fifteen years before joining la Sorbonne Paris 1 and the Conservatoire Européen d'Ecriture Audiovisuelle to study French screenwriting. I then worked as a script doctor and translator for film, TV, and theatre, and localization specialist for advertising. I have published a couple of novels, one of which, a historical fiction titled A Useless Mouth has been studied by International section lycéen.nes in France.