Brianna O'Boyle | University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences

Brianna O'Boyle

PhD Student

Research Assistant-Linguistic Atlas Project

I am a second year PhD student in Linguistics at the University of Kentucky. I firmly believe language is a tool that we, as humans, use to communicate with one another and we should investigate how the social components of our nature influence and affect our perception and use of language. I also serve as the Research Assistant for the Linguistic Atlas Project. My most recent projects include exploring ways to (ethically) apply gen-ai tools (ASR and OCR models) to historic data.

My QP is about Perceptual Dialectology of [a] on a North South Continuum in Germany (based off of Plichta and Preston 2005).

Contact Information

brianna.oboyle@uky.edu

004 Miller Hall (Linguistic Atlas Project)

Education

MA in General Linguistics, San Diego State University, 2022-2024
BA in East Asian Studies-Chinese Concentration, Gettysburg College, 2014-2018

Research Interests

Sociolinguistics
Corpus Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
Pragmatics
Psycholinguistics

Affiliations

Linguistics

Curriculum Vitae (CV)

Selected Publications

Selected Publications:

O'Boyle, Brianna. 2025. “Careful Consideration in Communicating Rejection: Discourse Analysis of Politeness, Empathy, and Denial in PhD Rejection Letters”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 10 (1): 5928. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v10i1.5928.

O'Boyle, Brianna. 2024. “A San Diegan Debate: Take 8 or Take the 8: Investigating the Use of the Determiner ‘the’ before Numeric Freeways in San Diego”. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 9 (1): 5684. https://doi.org/10.3765/plsa.v9i1.5684.

O’Boyle Brianna & Gabriel Doyle. 2023. "Not Just Iconic: Emoji Interpretation is Shaped by Use". Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis at the Association of Computational Linguistics: 452–457. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.wassa-1.39