Margaret (Peggy) Renwick

I earned my Ph.D. in Linguistics at Cornell, and I'm currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Phonetics Laboratory at the University of Oxford. I'm studying the phonetics of consonants at word boundaries within the British National Corpus, as part of the Word Joins project.

Just for fun, here's a clip from Romanian TV in which I speak some Romanian and riff about the minimal pairs that crucially differentiate the vowels I study.

"Profesorii care predau Limba Romana la Oxford, cea mai buna universitate din Marea Britanie. 30 de studenti straini urmeaza cursul." Romania te iubesc, Pro TV, December 16 2012.

PUBLICATIONS

Renwick, Margaret E. L., Ladan Baghai-Ravary, Ros Temple and John Coleman. 2013. "Assimilation of word-final nasals to following word-initial place of articulation in United Kingdom English." Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, vol. 19 (June 2013): 060257.

Renwick, Margaret E. L. 2012. Vowels of Romanian: Historical, Phonological and Phonetic Studies. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University.

Renwick, Margaret E. L. 2012. What does %V Actually Measure? Cornell Working Papers in Phonetics and Phonology 2012: 1-20.

Renwick, Margaret E. L. 2011. Distinctive Distributions: A New Look at the Sonority-Intensity Relationship. Proceedings of the 39th Meeting of the Northeast Linguistic Society. Amherst, MA: GLSA.

Renwick, Margaret E. L. 2011. On the Origins of /ɨ/ in Romanian. In Julia Herschensohn, Ed. Romance Linguistics 2010: Selected papers from the 40th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), Seattle, March 2010. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Renwick, Margaret E. L. 2011. Phoneme Type Frequency in Romanian. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics: Proceedings of the 34th Annual Penn Linguistics Colloquium.

Shattuck-Hufnagel, Stefanie, Yelena Yasinnik, Nanette Veilleux and Margaret Renwick. 2007. A Method for Studying the Time Alignment of Gestures and Prosody in American English: ‘Hits’ and Pitch Accents in Academic-Lecture-Style Speech. In Fundamentals of Verbal and Nonverbal Communication and the Biometric Issue. Eds. Anna Esposito, Maja Bratanić, Eric Keller and Maria Marinaro. NATO Security through Science Series E: Human and Societal Dynamics, vol. 18. Washington, DC: IOS Press.

Yasinnik, Yelena, Margaret Renwick and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel. 2004. The timing of speech-accompanying gestures with respect to prosody. Paper presented at "From Sound to Sense: 50+ years of Speech Research" conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

PRESENTATIONS and POSTERS

Upcoming

"Assimilation of word-final nasals to following word-initial place of articulation in UK English." With Ladan Baghai-Ravary, Rosalind Temple, and John Coleman. Paper to be presented at Interspeech 2013, Lyon, France.

2012-2013

"Assimilation of word-final nasals to following word-initial place of articulation in United Kingdom English." With Ladan Baghai-Ravary, Rosalind Temple, and John Coleman. Poster presented at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics, Montreal, Canada. June 7, 2013.

"Testing Phonological Models of English on the Audio BNC." With Ladan Baghai-Ravary, Rosalind Temple, and John Coleman. Paper presented at PAC 2013, Aix-en-Provence, France. May 31, 2013.

"Unpredicted assimilations in UK English: Initial results from the Audio BNC." Invited talk at the Phonetics/Phonology Workshop, University of Edinburgh.

"Romanian Vowels: A laboratory phonology perspective." Invited talk at the General Linguistics Seminar, Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford.

"Word joins in real-life speech: a large corpus-based study." Invited talk at the Speech Lunch series, Phonetics Laboratory, University of Oxford.

"Beyond metaphony: At the interface of phonetics and phonology in Romanian." Invited talk at the Romance Linguistics Seminar, Research Centre for Romance Linguistics, University of Oxford.

"Phonological Effects on Vowel Coarticulation and Variability." Oral presentation at the 13th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Stuttgart, Germany, July 27, 2012.

Past

"Quantifying Rhythm: Interspeaker Variation in %V." Oral presentation at the 162nd Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Special Session: Speech Rhythm in Production, Perception and Acquisition. San Diego, California. November 4, 2011.

"Phonetic and Phonological Manifestations of Metaphony in Romanian." Oral presentation at the 85th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. January 9, 2011.

"On the origins of /ɨ/ in Romanian." Oral presentation at the 40th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages. Seattle, Washington. March 26, 2010.

"Phoneme Type Frequency in Romanian." Oral presentation at the 34th Penn Linguistics Colloquium. University of Pennsylvania. March 20, 2010.

"The %V Ratio: Rhythm Class or Phonotactics?" 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. San Francisco, California. January 10, 2009.
     Email me for a pdf of the poster.

"Revisiting Phonetic Correlates of Rhythm and Intensity." Oral presentation at the Linguistics Student Conference. Cornell University, Ithaca NY. December, 2008.

"Distinctive Distributions: A New Look at the Sonority-Intensity Relationship." 39th Meeting of the Northeast Linguistic Society. Ithaca, New York. November 7, 2008.

"The timing of speech-accompanying gestures with respect to prosody." Margaret Renwick, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel and Yelena Yasinnik. 147th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. New York, New York. May 24, 2004.

TEACHING

From Fall 2007 to Spring 2012, I taught Introductory Italian (1210-1220) as a TA in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell.

In Spring 2011, I was the TA for Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (LING 3302) at Cornell.

BACKGROUND

I graduated from Wellesley College in 2004, having double-majored in Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences and Italian Studies. Beginning in the summer of 2002 I worked for MIT's Speech Communication Group, part of the Research Lab for Electronics, where I studied phonology, prosody, and the relationship between gesture and prosody. After college, I spent a year at Jewel Cave National Monument, where I was the Cave Management Intern.

In my copious free time I like to run, cook, and explore new places. I also keep a list of all the rock concerts I've attended; it's approaching 200 entries.