Benjamin Molineaux

Lecturer

Background

As of April 2021, I am a Lecturer in Linguistics in our department.

I recently finished a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship entitled "Digital methods in New-World language change: Words & sounds in older Mapudungun", which explores the 400-year textual history of Mapudungun, the ancestral language of the Mapuche people of south-central Chile and Argentina. In order to explore the development of the language's phonology and morphology, I have created (and continue to update) the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun.

I have been a member of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics since 2014, when I came to Edinburgh to join the FITS Project (From Inglis to Scots: Mapping sounds to spellings). As part of that team, I used spelling variation within the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots to track the development of the Scots sounds across time and space.

I am generally interested in Historical Phonology and, in particular, prosodic structure and its impact on morphology.  I have applied these interests to my work on Mapudungun, Older Scots  and Old and Middle English.

Responsibilities & affiliations

The Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics (Secretary)

The English Language Research Group (Convenor)

Undergraduate teaching

In 2021-2022 I will be involved in the running of the following courses:

Postgraduate teaching

In 2021-2022 I will be involved in the running of the following courses:

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I am keen to supervising graduate/doctoral projects in phonology or historical linguistics, particulary if they have a focus on Scots or the New World.

Research summary

Historical phonology, morpho-phonlogy, stress systems, stress perception, Mapudungun (Araucanian), Old and Middle English, Older Scots

Research activities

View all 19 activities on Research Explorer

View all 29 publications on Research Explorer