Research Projects

Ongoing

• Testing the limits of the sociolinguistic monitor: The evaluation of pauses and pragmatic markers (with Maciej Baranowski, Manchester; Danielle Turton, Lancaster)
• Sociophonetic variation of intensifiers in Southern British and Scottish English: On the influence of function, context and predictability (with Bradley Mackay, Salzburg)
• Attitude acquisition in Austria: Tracking the emergence of a sociolinguistic monitor in English/German bilinguals from B2 to C2 level (with Julia Davydova, PH Vorarlberg)
• English personal pronouns: a system on the move? (with Lydia Speyer, Edinburgh)
• Double Standards: Codified norms and norms of usage in European languages (1600 – 2020) (with Stephan Elspaß, Imke Mendoza, Bernhard Pöll, Salzburg). The website of the conference, which we organise as part of this project, can be accessed here.
• Book project: Speaker evaluation studies – Their history, theory and practice
• Attitudes and English as a lingua franca: Accent discrimination in tourism and education
• Developmental sociolinguistics and the acquisition of variation in function words: that, the, a(n) and to

Completed

• Discourse markers, tag questions and indexicality: Towards an experimentally-assisted discourse analysis (AHRC-funded)
• The perception of consonantal variation in London and Edinburgh: A regional comparison (with Will Barras, Aberdeen; Michael Ramsammy, Edinburgh; Nicholas Flynn, Manchester; Leverhulme-funded grant Regional language variation and the indexical field)
• Age and the indexical field: Evidence from perception and conversational style in Manchester (with Michael Ramsammy, Edinburgh; ESRC-funded)
• Comparative sociolinguistics: Consonantal and vocalic variation in two British capitals (with Danielle Turton, Lancaster)
• Sociolinguistics and immigration: The acquisition of variation by immigrant teenagers in England and Scotland (with Miriam Meyerhoff, Wellington; Lynn Clark, Canterbury; ESRC-funded)
• Pragmatic markers in academic discourse: Form, function, and sociolinguistic distribution of discourse markers and question tags