My research examines the sociolinguistic constraints on variation, principally in communities characterised by language or dialect contact. I am currently engaged in a long-term project with the Nkep-speaking community in Vanuatu (East Santo) to document their language, including the synchronic variation found in Nkep. 

I have worked in Vanuatu for over thirty years. This includes a lot of work on Bislama, the national language which is an English-based creole. Most recently I worked with Carol Aru, Manfred Krifka and Tonjes Veenstra on variation in spoken, urban Bislama in the capital Port Vila.

Much of my work has been on creoles (Vanuatu and Bequia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, I also have a passing familiarity with Hawai‘i Pidgin). The (typical) lack of standardisation in creoles means the trajectories of variation and change may be very different from those observed in standardised languages. 

These languages are also generally used in post-colonial communities with long histories of struggles over identity and in which globalisation raises new questions over cultural and linguistic differentiation. I have published descriptive and variationist papers on features at virtually all levels of linguistic structure, but my primary interest remains syntactic and discourse features and how the social and linguistic ideologies of people in Vanuatu interact with patterns of multilingualism and language change there.  

I am currently actively working on synchronic and diachronic patterns of variation and change in Austronesian languages, especially the Oceanic sub-branch.