Stephen Laker
Lecturer
Address:
Samuel Alexander Building (Office N.G.15)
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
Phone: +44-(0)161-275 3198
E-mail: stephen.laker@manchester.ac.uk
Office Hours: Wednesdays 11:30-12:30
Research specialisation
Historical and comparative linguistics
Language change
Language contact
Dialectology
Phonology
Germanic languages
Celtic languages
Publications
Books (edited):
Forthc.: Problems of English historical phonology [= Anglia 126(3)]. (With Robert Mailhammer).
2007: Advances in Old Frisian philology [= Amsterdamer Beiträge zur älteren Germanistik 64]. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. xvi + 494pp. (With Rolf H. Bremmer Jr & Oebele Vries.)
Articles:
Forthc.: 'Hypercorrection and the /w/ ~ /v/ interchange'. In a Festschrift.
Submitted: 'An explanation for the early phonemicisation of a voice contrast in English fricatives'. In Markku Filppula & Juhani Klemola (eds.), Re-evaluating the Celtic hypothesis [= special issue of English Language and Linguistics].
2008: 'Changing views about Anglo-Saxons and Britons'. In Henk Aertsen & Bart Veldhoen (eds.), Six papers from the 28th Symposium on Medieval Studies held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam on 15 December 2006. Leiden: Leiden University Department of English, 1-38.
2008: 'The English negative comparative particle'. Transactions of the Philological Society 106/1, 1-28.
2007: 'Palatalization of velars: A major link of Old English and Old Frisian'. In Rolf H. Bremmer Jr, Stephen Laker & Oebele Vries. (eds.), Advances in Old Frisian Philology. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 165-184.
2005: 'Earliest Middle English ne "than"', Notes & Queries 52/2, 11-12. (With Rolf H. Bremmer Jr.)
2003: 'PGMC. +drepa-, G treffen "TO HIT"', Studia Etymologica Cracoviensia 8, 103-110. (With Robert Mailhammer and Theo Vennemann.)
2002: 'Zur Vergleichspartikel was im Bairischen', Sprachwissenschaft 27/4, 397-416.
2002: 'An explanation for the changes kw-, hw- > xw- in the English dialects', In Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Heli Pitkänen (eds.), The Celtic Roots of English, Joensuu: Joensuu University Press, 183-198.
Reviews:
In press: Iyeiri, Yoko (ed.). 2005. Aspects of English Negation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Word.
2006: Dossena, Marina and Roger Lass (eds.). 2004. Methods and Data in English Historical Dialectology. Bern: Peter Lang. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 6.
2003: Minkova, Donka. 2003. Alliteration and Sound Change in Early English. (= Cambridge Studies in Language 101.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. LinguistList 14.2625.
Papers read at conferences:
2008: 'Investigating Celtic influence on English phonology'. Langwidge Sandwidge, University of Manchester (14 October 2008).
2008: 'Quantity changes and doubling of consonants in Medieval English'. Triangle Conference, University of Manchester (27 Sept 2008).
2008: 'An explanation for the early phonemicisation of a voice contrast in English fricatives'. International Conference of English Historical Linguistics, University of Munich. Workshop: Problems in the historical phonology of English. (29 Nov 2008).
2007: 'Quantity changes in Medieval English'. 4th Indo-European Colloquium Leiden-Münster, University of Leiden, 7-8 May 2007. (8 May 2007)
2006: 'How British are the English?'. Annual English Philology Symposium, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 15 December 2006.
2006: 'Explaining changes in medieval northern English phonology'. DELS-1, [= Directions in English Language Studies], University of Manchester, 6-8 April 2006. (8 April 2008)
2006: 'Standardisierung und Hybridisierung im Norden Englands'. DGfS-28 annual conference [= Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft], University of Bielefeld, 22-24 February 2006. (22 Feb 2006)
2005: 'Palatalization in Old English and Old Frisian'. Frisian Philologists Congress, Leeuwarden, 14-16 December 2005. (16 Dec 2005)
2005: 'Dating and interpreting changes in medieval northern English phonology'. MESS-4, [= Fourth Medieval English Studies Symposium], University of Poznan, 27-28 November 2005. (28 Nov 2005)
2005: 'Palatalization in Old English and Old Frisian'. SHEL-4 [= Studies in the History of the English Language], Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, 30 Sept.-2 Oct 2005. (1 Oct 2005)
2004: 'On the origin of the English negative comparative particle'. Studies in the History of the English Language 3, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 6-7 May 2004. (6 May 2004)
2003: 'The geography of the change kw-, hw- > xw- in English dialects'. Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference 9, SUNY Buffalo, 25-27 April 2003. (26 April 2003)
2001: 'An explanation for the changes kw-, hw- > xw- in the English dialects'. An International Colloquium on Early Contacts between English and Celtic Languages, University of Joensuu Research Station, Mekrijärvi, Finland, 24-26 August 2001. (25 Aug 2001)
Professional biography
Education:
MA (Munich, 2002) Major: German Linguistics; Minors: Middle Eastern Languages; English Philology
PhD (Leiden, expected 2009) in Linguistics
Membership:
International Society for the Linguistics of English
Philological Society
Society for Germanic Linguistics
Vereniging van Oudgermanisten
Yorkshire Dialect Society
Other activities:
Organiser of the weekly Linguistics and Language Studies Seminar Series
Teaching Areas:
Historical linguistics, Sociolinguistics, English dialects, Old English
Dr Eva Berlage
Lecturer in Linguistics
Address:
Samuel Alexander Building (room N.1.6)
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester
M13 9PL
Phone: +44-(0)161-275 3250
E-mail: eva.berlage@manchester.ac.uk
Office hours (semester 1, 2008-9): Wednesday, 9am-11am
Research specialisation
Variation and change, functional grammar, regional variation, corpus analysis
Prizes
2008 Honorable mention for the paper "The story of taking people prisoner(s) unfolded or how take prisoner(s) lost plural marking" in the Richard M. Hogg Prize competition
2008 Prize awarded by the University of Paderborn for excellent dissertation
2006 Prize awarded by the University Association for excellent 'Staatsexamen' thesis
Publications
(in prep.) Is more wordy more complex? Or why longer noun phrases are not always more difficult to process than shorter ones.
(in prep.) "The story of taking people prisoner(s) unfolded or how take prisoner(s) lost plural marking."
(submitted) The gradual denominalization of nominal complements in English." Special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society 107.2.
(in press) Prepositions and postpositions. In: Günter Rohdenburg and Julia Schlüter (eds.), One language, two grammars? Differences between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2007 Processing complexity and grammatical variation in British and American English. Unpublished PhD, University of Paderborn.
2005 Aller guten Dinge sind zwei oder Warum Briten appeal against the decision und Amerikaner appeal the decision sagen. Forschungsforum 2005.
Presentations
2008 "Is more wordy more complex? How variation is affected by NP-length and NP-structure." Paper presented at ISLE1, Freiburg (Germany), 8-11 October 2008.
2008 "As far as going to Ascona is concerned/goes/ø: Discourse factors and the variable absence of the verb phrase in topic-restricting as far as constructions." Paper presented at ICAME 29, Ascona (Switzerland), 14-18 May 2008.
2008 "Aspects of denominalization in English." Paper presented at the Workshop on the English NP, Sheffield (GB), 4-5 April 2008.
2008 "Komplexitätsunterschiede und reduzierte Nominalphrasen in der Umgebung von Adpositionen." 9. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, Bielefeld (Germany), 5-6 March 2008.
2008 Invited speaker at the University of Düsseldorf: "Postpositions and the shortening of noun phrases." Düsseldorf (Germany), 23 January 2008.
2007 Invited speaker at the University of Osnabrück: "May I take the audience prisoner(s)? Sprachwandel und Variation am Beispiel der Kollokation take s.o. prisoner(s)." Osnabrück (Germany), 30 October 2007.
2007 Invited speaker at the University of Uppsala (Sweden): "And then he took them prisoner(s): The history and present behaviour of an emergent multi-word predicate." Uppsala (Sweden), 18 October 2007.
2007 "Truncated noun phrases and the placement of adpositions." 2nd International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE), Toulouse (France), 2-4 July 2007.
2007 "Is more wordy more complex? - Oder warum längere NPs nicht automatisch schwieriger zu verarbeiten sind als kürzere." 8. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, Göttingen (Germany), 7-8 March 2007.
2006 "Cognitive Complexity at the lexis-grammar interface: The loss of the verbal coda in topic-restricting as far as constructions." Exploring the Lexis-Grammar Interface (ELeGI), Hanover (Germany), 5-7 October 2006.
2006 "And then we took them prisoner(s): The loss of number agreement with object predicatives." 14th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL), Bergamo (Italy), 21-25 August 2006.
2006 "And then we took them prisoner(s): Der Verlust der Pluralkongruenz bei Objektprädikativen." 7. Norddeutsches Linguistisches Kolloquium, Bremen (Germany), 2-3 March 2006.
2006 "Cognitive complexity and horror aequi as determinants of grammatical variation: Marked vs. unmarked infinitives following transitive uses of help." 28th Annual Conference of the German Linguistics Society (DGfS), Bielefeld (Germany), 22-24 February 2006.
2005 "Word-order variation in the case of notwithstanding: Structural complexity as a determinant of grammatical variation." 1st International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE), Edinburgh (GB), 23-25 June 2005.