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ISLE Research Network

Search for research themes

Members of ISLE can choose to create a brief profile of their current research activities for publication on our website. Each profile may contain up to 5 'themes', and each theme may include any number of keywords.

We aim for this page to be a showcase of research in English Linguistics. It will enable members to get in touch with others working on related research topics.

Use your own keywords or choose ISLE member / Linguist List keywords:

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(Socio)Linguistic Effects across Political Borders

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Long neglected as "unimportant" variation, political borders that cut across older dialect zones reveal interesting linguistic and sociolinguistic features that are very "real" for speakers

Morpho-syntactic variation and change

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Integrating syntactic theory into variationist analysis of morpho-syntactic phenomena to understand the underlying structure of variation and the processes of change

  • Expires after: 01-01-2200
  • Keywords: Syntax,Variation,Language Change

Discourse-pragmatic variation and change

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Variation and change in the use of discourse-pragmatic features such as question tags; discourse pragmatic effects in relation to syntactic phenomena

  • Expires after: 01-01-2200
  • Keywords: Discourse-pragmatic,Variation,Language Change

19c grammars and grammar writing

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I investigate British and American grammars, grammar writing and their influence on language change of the time, based on corpus studies and my collection of nineteenth-century grammars (CNG).

Variation and Change in English

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Grammatical and phonological variation in past and present varieties of English; functional conditioning; based on linguistic corpora and text databases; with a focus on quantitative methodologies.

  • Expires after: 31-12-2030
  • Keywords: Alternations,Constraints On Variation,Corpus Linguistics,Diachronic Variation,Historical Linguistics,Language Change,Phonology,Quantitative Methods,Variationist Linguistics,World Englishes,Grammar

Scots orthography

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For my MA dissertation, I carried out a study of Scots online. This addressed ambiguity surrounding the definition of Scots, and which orthographic variants are 'good' or 'bad'.

  • Expires after: 05-12-2022
  • Keywords: Bilingualism,Language Change,Language Contact,Sociolinguistics

Language contact and grammatical change in early English

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How much is early English syntax shaped by contact with Celtic and Norse? My Konstanz inaugural lecture (see link) gives an overview of some of my work on this so far.

Acquisition, Variation, and Diachronic Change in and across English Amplifiier Systems

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This research project focuses on the amplification of adjectives in English (e.g. very good, really nice) using a corpus-based quantitative approach.

  • Expires after: 30-09-2021
  • Keywords: Variation,Corpus Linguistics,Language Change,Quantitative Methods

Constraints on syntactic variation: noun phrases in early Germanic languages

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The project (2017-2020) focuses on noun phrase word order in Old English, Old Norse (Old Icelandic and Old Norwegian), Old Swedish, Old High German, Old Saxon, and Gothic.

Information structure and word order change in Germanic and Romance languages

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Completed project (2010-2014), which dealt with information structure in Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Old French, Old Spanish, Classical Portuguese. It is a topic I am still interested in.