The English Language Research Group

The English Language Research Seminar Series

The ELRG seminar series features a range of activities on a wide range of aspects of the synchronic and diachronic linguistics of English, such as talks by members of the department, discussions of recent articles, informal discussion of work in progress and invited speakers from elsewhere. The Research Group events are normally held every two weeks or so (during semester time, and perhaps on into the early summer) on Friday afternoons at 1pm in the Angus McIntosh room (1.17) in the Dugald Stewart Building. Anyone interested is welcome to attend.

The ELRG is organised by Heinz Giegerich and Rhona Alcorn. If you would like to be added to the ELRG mailing list, which distributes messages about meetings and other matters of interest to members of the Group, email heinz.giegerich@ed.ac.uk and rhona.alcorn@ling.ed.ac.uk.

Here's the current plan:
  • 27th May 2011: Maryam Bakht (Hunter College, City University of New York) 'What We Know (and Don't Know) About English Adverbial Intensifiers'
    • ABSTRACT: Adverbial (and sometimes adjectival) intensifiers, also known as degree modifiers, convey the degree of the quality of the modified element. Bolinger 1972 stated that intensifiers are a linguistic spot of 'fevered invention' and much of the work on intensifiers has noted that the study of intensifiers in English is one place where grammatical change occurs most robustly. At the same time, while much has been learned about the origins and development of intensifiers in English, renewed interest in the semantic study of intensifiers has focused on the semantic changes in individual intensifiers through the lens of grammaticalization. This talk gives an overview of some of the linguistic areas of inquiry in the study of intensifiers, focusing on newer intensifiers such as all and so (as in 'He comes in all proud and happy' and 'I'm so hungry, I can't even decide what to eat'). In addressing the different angles at which the study of intensifiers has progressed, I suggest that sociolinguistic investigation of intensifiers, particularly variationist examinations, may contribute to the analyses of the linguistic feature in more formal linguistic domains.

Here's what has been on offer:

  • 4th March 2011: Nicolas Ballier (Paris 7) 'Rhythm and syllabification in English native and non-native speech'
  • 17th December 2010: Patrick Honeybone 'How symmetrical are English vowels?' +  drinks/meal after work
  • 3rd December 2010: No meeting, because of the snow...
  • 19th November 2010: Heinz Giegerich 'adverb-forming -LY ' [Martin can't come to Edinburgh, so: Martin Kraemer (Tromso) 'Microvariation in Northern Irish derived contrasts']
  • 5th November 2010: Katalin Balogne Berces (Pazmany Peter CU) 'English meets Strict CV Phonology'
  • 13th October 2010: Lauren Hall-Lew New Perspectives on Language and Ethnicity in U.S. English: Vocalic Variation in San Francisco, California 
    • NB: Lauren's talk is a joint meeting with the Language in Context Research Group; the talk starts at 3.30pm and is in room 3.10
  • [CANCELLED - Des has had the mumps] 14th April 2010: Des Ryan 
  • 31st March 2010: Discussion of...
    • McWhorter, John (2002) 'What happened to English?' Diachronica 19, 217-72.
  • 17th March 2010: Remco Knooihuizen 'Pre-aspiration and Shetland English'18 December 2009 (room 1.17), Lauren Stewart
  • 4th December 2009: Will Barras
  • 20th November 2009: Lynn Clark
  • 6th November 2009: Marton Soskuthy
  • 23rd October 2009: grant proposal workshop, led by Nik Gisborne
  • 16th October 2009: Rhona Alcorn 'Multiple regression: do all roads lead to Rome?'
  • 1st April  2009: Cynthia Allen (ANU) 'The Early English "His Genitive" and Germanic Possessor Doubling'
  • 27th March 2009: Patrick Honeybone 'Scouse Diddification'
  • 13th March 2009: Nik Gisborne 'Finiteness in Hong Kong English'
  • 27th February 2009: No meeting
  • 13th February 2009: Maria Jose Carrillo Linares (Huelva) 'Processing raw data for Middle English word geography: problems in interpreting and mapping'
  • 6th February 2009: Ingo Plag (Siegen) 'The variability of compound stress in English: Probabilities, rules and exemplars'
  • 16th January 2009: Graeme Trousdale & Elizabeth Traugott (Stanford) Discussion of draft paper 'Gradience, gradualness and grammaticalization: How do they intersect?'
  • 5th December 2008: Robert Truswell 'Parataxis and Coreference in Early Modern English Correlatives'
  • 21st November 2008: Warren Maguire 'Quantifying dialect similarity by comparison of the lexical distribution of phonemes'
  • 7th November 2008: John Payne (Manchester) & Geoff Pullum [joint research with Rodney Huddleston (Queensland)] 'The adjective and adverb categories in English cannot be conflated, and the traditional view that they are differentiated by their syntactic functions is wrong: new arguments and new evidence'
  • 31st October 2008: Chris Montgomery 'Geographical perceptions of dialects in England'
  • 17th October 2008: Renata Gregova (Pavol Jozef Safarik University) 'On Phonetic Iconicity in Evaluative Morphology'
  • [we skipped the 10th October because of ISLE]
  • 26th September 2008: Penny Thompson 'The lexicalization of syncope: derivational affixes in West Saxon adjectives' 
  • 18th April 2008: Wojtek Gardela 'The Present Participle in the Northern English and Scots of the Late 14th and the 15th Centuries'
  • 14th March 2008: Lauren Stewart '"Shee is Northern, and speakes so": Two Representations of Northern Dialect in 17th Century Drama'
  • 29th February 2008: Claire Cowie & Ross Pirie 'As far as we're concerned: The set of viewpoint subjunct (or topic restrictors) in English'
  • 15th February 2008: No session  [reading week]
  • 1st February 2008: Discussion of...
    • Crisma, Paola (2007) 'Were they 'dropping their aitches'? A quantitative study of h- loss in Middle English' English Language and Linguistics 11,1: 51-80.
    • [download from here, on a university-networked computer]
  • 11th January 2008: Keith Williamson 'The Rough Guide to LAOS'
  • 7th December 2007: Bert Vaux (Cambridge) 'The phonology of English rhotacism'
  • 30th November 2007: Lisa Lim (Amsterdam) 'Singlish is a tone language meh55? Particles and prosody in a contact variety of English'
  • Tuesday 20th November 2007, at 5.15pm, in room B9 in the Adam Ferguson Building: Angus McIntosh / Institute for Historical Dialectology Lecture. Philip Durkin (Principal Etymologist, Oxford English Dictionary) 'Lexical borrowing: some reflections based on work on the third edition of the OED'
  • 9th November 2007: Edurne Garrido Anes (Huelva) 'Dialectal Diversity in Middle English: Dealing with the Lexicon'
  • 26th October 2007: Rhona Alcorn 'The syntax of pronominal objects of prepositions in Old English: an empirical study into the effects of grammatical person'
  • 12th October 2007: Tom Burton (Adelaide) 'Re-sounding "The vaices that be gone": the pronunciation of William Barnes's dialect poems'
  • 28th September 2007: Discussion of...  [rescheduled]
    • Nunberg, Geoffrey, Sag, Ivan & Wasow, Thomas (1994) 'Idioms' Language. 70: 491-538.
  • 21st September 2007: Discussion of plans for the ELRG this year + Graeme Trousdale 'Construction Grammar and lexicalization in the history of English' (20 minute practice talk for SHEL).
  • 22nd June 2007: two speakers:
    • Amanda Patten 'How specificational are cleft sentences?'
    • Remco Knooihuizen 'Language shift and new-dialect formation: the development of Shetland Scots'
  • 1st June 2007: Heinz Giegerich, Nik Gisborne & Graeme Trousdale 'Subsective attribution'
  • 4th May 2007: Discussion of...  [postponed - too much else on]
    • Nunberg, Geoffrey, Sag, Ivan & Wasow, Thomas (1994) 'Idioms' Language. 70: 491-538.
  • 20th April 2007: No session because of the LEL postgraduate conference
  • 23rd March 2007: Robert McKenzie 'The influence of preceptions of L1 and social variables on non-native attitudes towards varieties of English speech'
  • 9th March 2007: Derek Britton 'Hyper-rhoticity (unetymological /r/ epenthesis) and the supposed Early Modern English Deletion of /r/ in unstressed syllables'
  • 23rd February 2007: Roger Lass (Cape Town) 'Was there a schwa in early English?'
  • 2nd February 2007: Remco Knooihuizen 'Fishing for words: the sociolinguistic significance of a word list'
  • 19th January 2007: Nikolaus Ritt (Vienna) 'Revisiting Middle English vowel quantity'
  • 14th December 2006: Discussion of...
    • Scheibman, Joanna (2001) "Local patterns of subjectivity in person and verb type in American English conversation". In Bybee, J & Hopper, P. (eds.) Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
  • 24th November 2006: Patrick Honeybone 'Where and what is Northern English t-to-r?'
  • Wednesday 8th November 2006: Institute for Historical Dialectology Lecture at 5.00pm in room B9 in the Adam Ferguson Building: Hermann Moisl (Newcastle) 'Nonlinear exploratory multivariate analysis of historical text corpora'
  • 3rd November 2006: Anne Hoyer (Heidelberg) 'The Scottishness of Oor Wullie'
  • 27th October 2006: Warren Maguire 'Quantitative phonetic comparison of varieties of English'
  • 13th October 2006: Discussion of...
    • Schreier, Daniel & Trudgill, Peter (2006) 'The segmental phonology of nineteenth-century Tristan da Cunha English: convergence and local innovation'. English Language and Linguistics 10: 119–141.
  • 29th September 2006: Meg Laing 'You can't beat the system. Newton, dogs, fleas and early Middle English'
  • 17 March 2006: Sonja Kleinke (Freie Universitaet Berlin) 'Cognitive explorations into in the speaker's role in the maxims of conversation'
  • 10 March 2006: Discussion of...
    • Hickey, Raymond (2002) 'The Atlantic edge: the relationship between Irish English and Newfoundland English' English World-Wide 23:2, 283–316.
  • 24 February 2006: Will Barras '"The exhalations whizzing in the...er?" SQUARE and NURSE in  Lancashire English'
  • 10 February 2006: Patrick Honeybone will lead a discussion of...
    • Hay, Jennifer & Sudbury, Andrea (2005) 'How rhoticity became /r/-sandhi' Language 81.
  • 3 February 2006: Discussion of plans for the ELRG
  • 16 December 2005: Sarah Collie 'Putting Stress Preservation to bed'
  • 2 December 2005: Warren Maguire 'The NURSE and NORTH "merger" in Tyneside English'
  • 18 November 2005: Linda van Bergen 'Negative contraction in Old English dialects'
  • 21 October 2005: Claire Cowie 'English in call centres in India'
  • 7 October 2005: Fiona Marshall (Sheffield) 'Linguistics and Philology'
  • 28 September 2005: Juan Gabriel Vazquez Gonzalez (Huelva University) 'Trust the Historical Text, too: on Conceptual Collocates and Historical Categorization'
  • 4 March 2005: Norman Macleod 'Lines, Schemes, Syntax'
  • 18 February 2005: Elizabeth C. Traugott (Stanford) 'Lexicalization and Grammaticalization: similarities and differences revisited'
  • 18 February 2005: Nik Gisborne 'Against Copy Raising'
  • 4 February 2005: Lynn Clark 'Cognitive Grammar and sociolinguistic variation - towards a theory of cognitive sociolinguistics'
  • 2 February 2005: James M. Scobbie (QMUC) 'The Scottish Vowel Length Rule and the distribution of /ai/ variants in word-internal contexts.'
  • 3 December 2004: Meg Laing and Roger Lass (Cape Town) 'Early Middle English "knight": (Pseudo)metathesis and lexical specificity'
  • 1 December 2004: Dick Hudson (UCL) 'From structure to use via the language network'
  • 26 November 2004: Patrick Honeybone 'SQUAREing the NURSEicle in Liverpool English'
  • 23 November 2004: Anthony Warner (York) [= IHD lecture] 'Doing it with Style'
  • 12 November 2004: Graeme Trousdale 'The demise of the impersonal construction in English: a Cognitive Grammar account'
  • 8 October 2004: Heinz Giegerich 'English NN constructions: compound or phrase?'
  • 7 May 2004: Ricardo Bermudez-Otero (Newcastle) 'Raising and flapping in Canadian English: grammar and acquisition'
  • 23 April 2004: Derek Britton 'Degemination in Middle English'
  • 12 March 2004: Graeme Trousdale 'Issues in Old English sociolinguistics'
  • 27 February 2004: Nik Gisborne 'The history of English evidential verbs of appearance'
  • 13 February 2004: Jeremy Smith (Glasgow) 'Another look at phonaesthesia'
  • 30 January 2004: Roger Lass (Cape Town) 'Aster me the dell huge: substitutive logic and chains of permission in some 13th-century scribal languages.'

Other Research Groups in Linguistics and English Language

Several members of the English Language Research Group are also members of the Historical Phonology Reading Group, but both groups meet and function independently. As part of the Department of Linguistics and English Language, many of us are also members of other LEL research groups. For details of these, use the following links: