Marc Barnard

I'm a postdoctoral researcher on the MATHY: Mathematical Hygiene project at Paris Cité University (PI: Heather Burnett). The project investigates how normative discourses about mathematics (mathematical hygiene) might resemble normative discourses about language (verbal hygiene). My role has been to help in developing a series of choice blindness tasks, which aim to examine the extent to which decision-making about sociolinguistic variation and mathematical proofs is determined by intuitive processing or conscious reasoning. Another element considers how mathematicians use register and create identities through examining online discourse and linguistic variation.

I completed my PhD at Queen Mary University of London in 2025, and was funded by LISS-DTP (ESRC). I was supervised by Devyani Sharma (QMUL) and Bronwen Evans (UCL). My thesis considered second dialect acquisition among speakers from the North West of England, who had moved to the South of England for university. I was interested in how and why speakers' production and perception change after migration, with a particular focus on sociolinguistic awareness, identity and individual cognitive factors.

My research interests lie mainly within variationist sociolinguistics, sociophonetics and speech perception. I am particularly interested in how methods from social psychology might be used to address sociolinguistic questions.