Welcome to my page. My name is Chris Taylor, and I am (amongst other things) a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Rice University. I am currently finishing my dissertation, which focuses on the processes undergirding stylistic conventionalization and its political implications in Houston Hip Hop music and culture. To see my CV, click the link above for the most up-to-date version, or check out some of my teaching materials to sneak a peak at my chalk-holding side.

My research interests cross disciplinary boundaries, so describing myself as a linguist is leaving out part of the story. Within the broader linguistic tradition, I locate my work in the areas of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, though social theory and the (sub)cultural literature also inform my work. The focus of my present project is on processes of stylistic conventionalization in Houston Hip Hop which involve the sedimentation of social practices croscutting various semiotic modalities (sartorial, kinesic, linguistic, etc.). Along the linguistic dimension, my work explores the relations between phonetic variation, entextualization, repetition, and salience. I refer to these relations as the nesting doll of indexical bootstrapping. Not really, that's too cumbersome. But I am nonetheless interested in such things.