I joined this department in 2005 after five years in the Department of
English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield.
Before that I studied and taught in South Africa, the US and Germany
as well as the UK.
Major research interests
World Englishes
I am interested in what happens to these varieties in
international settings, in what speakers perceive happens, and what
they believe ought to happen. Since 2004 I have researched these
issues in the Indian call centre industry, and now I have a new
project on a South African call centre. The call centre research is
complemented by research on L1 and L2 speaker interaction in
experimental settings, as well as traditional sociolinguistic
fieldwork in Bangalore. Much of this research concerns phonological
variables, but I am also interested in discourse and pragmatic
phenomena in World Englishes.
Morphological productivity
My doctoral dissertation was a study of
morphological productivity (abstract nouns) in historical English
corpora. Subsequently I have used the OED to compile very large
databases on English word-formation processes in order to chart the
emergence of productivity in these processes over time. I have
challenged the view that Latinate word-formation processes in English
uniformly develop productivity in the Early Modern period.
Pragmatics
Topic-restricting constructions (in corpora of L1
Englishes); intensifiers (in corpora of World Englishes).
Teaching and Supervision
My teaching has focused on three areas over the past ten years: World
Englishes, Pragmatics, and Corpus Linguistics. I teach these subjects
at all levels of the curriculum at Edinburgh. I am the convenor of the
MSc in English Language.
Publications
(In press) "Early Modern English morphology". In Bergs, Alexander and Laurel Brinton (eds.) HSK - Historical Linguistics of English. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
2010. With Lalita Murty. "Researching and understanding accent shifts in Indian call centre agents". Globalization, Communication and the Workplace: Talking Across the World. eds. Gail Forey and Jane Lockwood. Continuum.
2010. "Anyone doing something phonetic can attract business these days: The demand and supply of accents in the Indian call centre industry": Language and the Market, eds. Helen Kelly-Holmes and Gerlinde Mautner. Palgrave-Macmillan series on Language and Globalization.
2007. "The accents of outsourcing: the meanings of 'neutral' in the Indian call centre industry". World Englishes 26(3)
2006. "Economical with the truth: register categories and the functions of -wise viewpoint adverbs in the British National Corpus". ICAME Journal Vol. 30 (2006)
2003. "Uncommon terminations: proscription and morphological productivity", Italian Journal of Linguistics 15:2 Special issue on Morphological Productivity, ed. Livio Gaeta and Mark Aronoff.
2002. With Christiane Dalton-Puffer. "Diachronic Word-formation: theoretical and methodological considerations" in A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Semantics and Lexis, ed. Javier.
2000. "The discourse motivations of neologising: action nominalization in the history of English", in Lexicology, Semantics and Lexicography in English Historical Linguistics: Papers from the Fourth G.L. Brook Symposium, eds. Julie Coleman and Christian Kay, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
1995. Grammaticalization and the Snowball Effect, Language and Communication, vol. 15 (2). 181-193. Joint articles.
Reviews and Notes
2006. Review of Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of colonial English: studies in transported dialects (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Journal of Linguistics 42: 473-47
2005. "Bourdieu". In Chapman, S. & Routledge, P. (eds) Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2005. "Kripke". In Chapman, S. & Routledge, P. (eds) Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
