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Professor of English Linguistics

Qualifications

Previous Positions

Current Work

Language Variation and Change

I am interested in reported speech/thought and in intensification, two areas of the linguistic system that have been the locus of fast and far-reaching changes. I have done research on California youth trends, on globalization phenomena and on attitudes to rapid language change phenomena. Together with my colleague Ingrid van Alphen (University of Amsterdam) I have edited a volume that draws together interdisciplinary research on reported speech: Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspectives (John Benjamins). I have also written a monograph on quotation entitled Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications (Wiley-Blackwell).

I was the holder of a 4-year Marie Curie CIG grant, which investigates “Diagnostics of linguistic change: Mapping language change in real and apparent time”.

From May 27th to 29th 2015 Leipzig University hosted ICLAVE8. Check out our webpage here: conference.uni-leipzig.de/iclave8/index.html

Dialectology

Together with my colleagues Karen Corrigan and Anders Holmberg, I have developed and tested methodologies to trace (morpho-)syntactic and discourse variability across social and geographical space. I have also written on the use of up-to-date geographical models in linguistic analysis (with Seraphim Alvanides). In collaboration with colleagues at Newcastle University and Edinburgh University I have investigated the patterning of a number of morpho-syntacic and phonological phenomena in the English-Scottish Borderland. Karen Corrigan, Hermann Moisl, Adam Mearns and myself have collated a large corpus of recordings and transcriptions of Tyneside English speech, the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte), which spans recordings from informants born between 1895 and 1993.

Language contact

At the beginning of my academic career, I analysed the way speakers encode causality, concessivity and conditionality in Hawaiian Creole. I continue to be interested in the outcome of language contact, both on a local and on a global scale. Together with colleagues at Stanford (John Rickford, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Tom Wasow and Arnold Zwicky) and with Alexandra D’Arcy (University of Victoria) I have investigated the global repercussions of the fast spreading innovative quotatives and intensifiers. I have edited a volume (with Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Al-Moaily) on non-Indo European and non-West African Pidgin and Creole languages: Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa - Europe encounters (Benjamins). With Julia Davydova, I examined the use of new English trends by speakers of German.

My most recent project investigates the varieties which result from contact between speakers of Marshallese and English in the Marshall Islands. This project is funded by the DFG and I am collaborating with Irene Taafaki (USP, Majuro), Nik Willson (CMI, Majuro) and Robert Early (USP, Vanuatu). Check out my blog here: http://islandlanguage.weebly.com/.

Publications

since 2014 editor of the series Routledge Studies in Language Change (with Suzanne Wagner).

Monographs and edited books

To appear 2020 Panel Studies in Language Variation and Change II, edited volume (with Karen Beaman), Routledge.

2019 The Routledge Companion to John Russel Rickford, edited volume (with Renée Blake). Routledge.  

2017 Panel Studies in Language Variation and Change, edited volume (with Suzanne Evans Wagner), Routledge.

2017 Language Variation: European Perspectives VI, edited volume (with Beat Siebenhaar), Benjamins.

2014 Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications. Monograph, Wiley-Blackwell.

2014 Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters, edited volume (with Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Almoaily), Benjamins Series ‘Creole Language Library’.

2012 Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and Cross-disciplinary Perspectives, edited volume (with Ingrid van Alphen), Benjamins Series ‘Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research’.

2011 The Talk of the Toon, CD and booklet, Newcastle University Press (with Karen Corrigan, Adam Mearns and Herman Moisl). 

Articles in journals and edited books

in prep. “(h) in Marshallese English”. In Miriam Meyerhoff and Eri Kashman (eds). Special issue of Asia-Pacific Language Variation.

in prep. “Down to a (t). Changes across the life-span in the glottal realisation of /t/ in the North East of England”. (first author, with Anne Lerche, Adam Mearns and Anja Auer)

under review. “Ideology and memory in the linguistic landscape: Towards a quantitative approach”. Critical Discourse Studies (with Malgorzata Fabiszak, Anna Weronika Bre, and Seraphim Alvanides)

2020a. “The origin of panel corpura: the case of Eskilstuna”. In Karen Beaman and Isabelle Buchstaller (eds.), Panel Studies in Language Variation and Change II. Routledge (with Eva Sundgren and Karen Beaman).

2020b. “Exploring heuristics for conceptualising change across the life-span”. In Karen Beaman and Isabelle Buchstaller (eds.), Panel Studies in Language Variation and Change II. Routledge (with Johanna Mechler and Anne Lerche).

2020c. “Marshallese English”. In David Britain et al. (eds.), Micronesian Englishes. Mouton de Gruyter (first author, with Nik Willson).

2020d. “Competing ideologies, competing semiotics: A critical perspective on politically-driven renaming practices in Annaberg-Buchholz, Eastern Germany”. In Evelyn Zigeler and Heiko Marten. (eds.),  Linguistic Landscapes im deutschsprachigen Kontext. Frankfurt: Lang. (first author, with Seraphim Alvanides, Frauke Griese and Carolin Schneider)

2019a. “Introduction to the Volume”. In Renée Blake and Isabelle Buchstaller (eds), The Routledge Companion to John Russel Rickford. Routledge. (with Renée Blake).  

2019b.   “Instability in the use of a stable variable”. Linguistics Vanguard. Special Issue on Aging. (with Johanna Mechler)

2018a. “Sociolinguistic variation on Tyneside”. In Sandra Jansen and Natalie Braber (eds.), Sociolinguistics in England. Palgrave (fist author, with Adam Mearns), 215-241.

2018b. “Linguistic landscapes and the ideology of language choice: The case of the Marshall Islands”. Journal of Linguistic Geography (first author, with Seraphim Alvanides).

2018c. “Marshallese English: A first sketch”. World Englishes 37(2): 356-383 (first author, with Nik Willson).

2018d. “Investigating the bilingual landscape of the Marshall Islands”. In Martin Pütz and Neele Mundt (eds.), Expanding the Linguistic LandscapeLinguistic Diversity, Multimodality and the Use of Space as a Semiotic Resource. Lang, Frankfurt. (first author, with Seraphim Alvanides). 203-228.

2017a. “Using panel data in the sociolinguistic study of variation and change. In Suzanne Evans Wagner and Isabelle Buchstaller (eds.), Panel Studies in Language Variation and Change.  Routledge (first author, with Suzanne Evans Wagner). 1-18.

2017b. “Levelling across the life-span? Tracing the FACE vowel in panel data from the North East of England”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 21(1): 3-33 (first author, with Anne Krause, Anja Auer and Stefanie Otte).

2017c. “Reported speech”. In Anne Barron, Peter Grundy and Gu Yueguo (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics. Routledge, Oxford, 399-417.

2017d. “Introduction”.  In Isabelle Buchstaller and Beat Siebenhaar (eds.), Language Variation: European Perspectives VI, edited volume (with Beat Siebenhaar), Benjamins. VII-XVI.

2016a. “Investigating the Effect of Socio-Cognitive Salience and Speaker-Based Factors in Morpho-Syntactic Life-Span Change”. Journal of English Linguistics 44(2): 199-229

2016b. “The Talk of the Toon: A linguistic time capsule for the Google generation”. In Karen Corrigan, Adam Mearns and Hermann Moisl (eds.), Digitizing Corpora, Vol. 3, Palgrave, London (with Karen Corrigan, Adam Mearns and Hermann Moisl), 177-210.

2015a. “Expanding the circle to Learner English: Investigating quotative marking in a German student community”. American Speech 90(4):441-478 (with Julia Davydova).

2015b. “Morphosyntactic features of Northern English”. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Researching Northern English. Benjamins (first author, with Karen Corrigan), 71-89.

2015c. “Perception, cognition, and linguistic structure: The effect of linguistic modularity and cognitive style on sociolinguistic processing”. Language Variation and Change 27(3): 319-348 (with Erez Levon).

2015d. “Exploring linguistic malleability across the life-span: Age-specific patterns in quotative use”. Language in Society 44(4):  457 - 496.

2014a. “Television and language use. What do we mean by influence and how do we detect it?”. Invited commentary. In Janis Androutsopolous (ed.), Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. De Gruyter. 205-213.

2014b. “Non-Indo-European and Non-West African contact languages: An introduction”. In Isabelle Buchstaller, Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Almoaily (eds.), Pidgins and Creoles beyond Africa-Europe Encounters. Benjamins (first author, with Anders Holmberg and Mohammad Almoaily).

2014c. “Sampling”. In Robert Podeswa and Devani Sharma (eds.), Research Methods in Linguistics. Cambridge University Press, 74-95 (first author, with Ghada Khattab).

2013a. “T-to-R and the Northern Subject Rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics”. Journal of English Linguistics 17(1): 85-128 (first author, with Karen Corrigan, Anders Holmberg, Patrick Honeybone, and Warren Maguire).

2013b. “Employing geographical principles for sampling in state of the art dialectological projects” Journal of Linguistic Geography 2 (first author, with Seraphim Alvanides)

2012 “Introductory remarks on new and old quotatives”. In Isabelle Buchstaller and Ingrid van Alphen (eds.), Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and Cross-disciplinary Perspectives. Benjamins, xii - xxx (first author, with Ingrid van Alphen).

2011a. “Quotations across the generations: A multivariate analysis of speech and thought introducers across 5 generations of Tyneside speakers”. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory: 59-92 (Special issue on Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistics.

2011b. “‘Judge not lest ye be judged’: Exploring methods for the collection of socio-syntactic data”. In Frans Gregersen, Pia Quist and Jeffrey Parrot (eds.), Language Variation - European Perspectives III. John Benjamins, 149-160 (first author, with Karen Corrigan).

2011c. “Making intuitions work: Testing instruments for measuring dialect syntax”. In Warren Maguire and April McMahon (eds.), Analysing Variation in English. Cambridge University Press, 30-48 (first author, with Karen Corrigan).

2010a. “The sociolinguistics of a short-lived innovation: Tracing the development of quotative all across real and apparent time”. Language Variation and Change 22: 1-29 (first author, with John Rickford, Elizabeth Traugott, Tom Wasow and Arnold Zwicky).

2010b. “Intensification on Tyneside: Longitudinal developments and new trends”. English World Wide 31:252-287 (with Kate Barnfield).

2009a. “Localized globalization: A multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative like”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13(3): 291-332 (first author, with Alexandra D’Arcy).

2009b. “The quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic variation: Constructing and quantifying the denominator”. The Linguistic Compass 3.

2008 “The localization of global linguistic variants”. English World Wide 29(1): 15-44.

2007 “Intensive and Quotative ALL: Something old, something new”. American Speech 82(1): 3-31 (second author, with John Rickford, Thomas Wasow, Arnold Zwicky and Elizabeth Traugott).

2006a. “‘The lady was all demonyak’: Historical aspects of adverbial all”. English Language and Linguistics 10(2): 345-370 (first author, with Elizabeth Traugott).

2006b. “Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perceptions displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the UK”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(3): 362-381.

2006c. “Globalization and local reappropriation: The case of the new quotatives”. In Christa Dürenscheid and Jürgen Spitzmüller (eds.), Trends and Developments in Youth Language Research. Lang, 315-334.

2006d. “Diagnostics of age graded linguistic behavior”. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10(1): 3-30.

2005 “Putting perception to the reality test: The case of go and like”. University of Philadelphia Working Papers in Linguistics 10(2): 61-75.

2004a. “Newcomers to the pool of quotatives: Like and go”. In Pilar Garcés Conejos, Reyes Gómez Moron, Lucia Fernández Amaya and Manuel Padilla Cruz (eds.), Current Trends in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics. University of Sevilla Press, 219-240.

2004b. “Comparing perceptions and reality: Newcomers to the quotative pool”. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 13:1-14.

2003 The co-occurrence of quotatives with mimetic performances. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 12:1-9.

2002 He goes and I’m like: The new quotatives re-visited. Internet Proceedings of the University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Conference. [available on-line: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~pgc%20/archive/2002/proc02/buchstaller02.pdf]

2001 An alternative view of like: Its grammaticalization in conversational American English and beyond. Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics 11: 21-41.

 

Web-based publication:

Data-base with dual interface targeting two groups of users:

• Researchers in linguistics, sociology or oral history: The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/): Collection of interviews (transcripts and recordings) conducted in the Tyneside area between 1960-2010, including user-handbook.
• Schools, museums and heritage groups: The Talk of the Toon (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/index.html), interactive website which integrates recordings from the 1960s to the 2000s with still/moving images.