Professor David Denison
Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature
Address: W.1.11, Samuel Alexander Building
Postgraduate Research Director, School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures
President, International Society for the Linguistics of English
Phone: +44 (0)161-275 3154
Email: david.denison@manchester.ac.uk
In semester 1 of 2009-10 I will be on sabbatical.
Research specialisation
Recent papers available for download.
My research has involved a number of complementary and intersecting strands.
- Possessive 's in Germanic. Kersti Börjars and I launched a three-year project in autumn 2006 (supported by an AHRC Research Grant of £270k) on the history and usage of possessive -s in English, Swedish and Dutch. Follow the link for information on the project and other researchers involved.
- Recent and current change in English syntax. Following my monograph-length chapter on late ModE Syntax for the Cambridge History of the English Language (IV, 1998), I have given a number of lectures and papers on current change.
- Gradience, especially in English morphology and syntax. I have been working for some time on gradience and categories, often in collaboration. The most recent of a series of papers are a chapter on determiners for a Blackwell Handbook (2006), involving new research on Old and Middle English, a joint presentation with Mariangela Spinillo and Alison Cort on the categories Modal and Determiner, and a chapter in a forthcoming collection on Gradualness, gradience, and grammaticalization. I helped edit a substantial reader on Fuzzy Grammar (2004) for OUP. I am working on a monograph for C.U.P. entitled English word classes: Categories and their limits.
- Historical syntax and the history of English generally. My commissioned book on English Historical Syntax (1993, reissued as a print-on-demand edition 2004) concentrated on verbal constructions, and my recent work has also dealt with developments in the noun phrase. Overall, every period of the language is tackled in my research to date. Richard Hogg and I have edited a major new History of the English Language (2006, paperback 2008). There is a small historical contribution to Huddleston & Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). Other work includes a paper on S-curves in historical change.
- Corpus work. I ran a project to apply morphological tagging to a collection of Middle English sermons, and in connection with the CHEL research created a nineteenth-century Corpus of late Modern English Prose (1994), with Graeme Trousdale and Linda van Bergen as assistants. A new Corpus of late Eighteenth-century Prose (letters in the John Rylands University Library) was transcribed by Linda van Bergen and Joana Proud and published on the web in 2003. In a plenary lecture in 2005 I explored the rich hoard of non-standard syntax in the letters and the question of what "change from below" signifies. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and I belong to the international consortium developing the third phase of ARCHER, a multi-genre historical corpus of British and American English from the 17th century to the present, giving access to it in Manchester. We are coordinating the current phase of the project.
- Construction Grammar. I have experimented with Construction Grammar theories, most explicitly in ongoing work on sort of/kind of constructions. An earlier attempt avant la lettre was embodied in papers on what I call the Information Present.
- Literary networks. An explanation for the origins of the progressive passive which involves social network theory and English literary politics ca 1800 was published in a joint paper with Lynda Pratt.
- Editorial work. I am heavily involved in editing, particularly of the journal English Language and Linguistics. We founded ELL with the hope that it would become the journal of choice for the community of scholars in the field of English historical linguistics, and would actually help to form a scholarly community among those working on present-day English. The journal is thriving. Nigel Vincent and I also constructed a special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society. I am co-editor of the Longman Linguistics Library (a series which has now succumbed to two publishing buyouts and is no longer commissioning new work). Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully, Emma Moore (all former students of Richard Hogg) and I are editing Analysing Older English for CUP.
- Computers. Work has included the multi-lingual Vuwriter Arts word processor in the 1980s; my own numbering program NUM in the 1990s; the acquisition and use of texts and corpora and the use of concordance programs (see Computer Resources for linguists ); and building a "temporary" (1999-2005!) and increasingly versatile student record database for department and School.
- Miscellaneous. I was one of a three-man team from the LAGB who advised the then Department for Education and Employment on materials for the literacy strategy in primary schools, notably the enhanced glossary. I retain an interest in the teaching of English language at school level. I chaired the organising committee of the 10th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (10ICEHL, 1998) and Directions in English Language Studies (DELS, April 2006).
Research Students
Current:
Sophie Guile (joint supervision with Kersti Börjars), "The possessive -s and the of-possessive: Identifying and accounting for relative frequency (1650-1800)". E-mail: charlotte dot s dot guile at postgrad dot manchester dot ac dot uk
Pauline Harries (joint supervision with Kersti Börjars), "The history and current distribution of the genitive in Insular Scandinavian" . E-mail: pauline dot harries at postgrad dot manchester dot ac dot uk
Marije van Hattum (joint supervision with Nuria Yáñez-Bouza), "A corpus study of Irish English verbal constructions from the 13th to the 19th centuries". E-mail: marije dot vanhattum at postgrad dot manchester dot ac dot uk
Ayumi Miura (joint supervision with Nuria Yáñez-Bouza), "Verbs of emotion and impersonals in Old and Middle English: A diachronic study in the syntax-semantics interface". E-mail: ayumi dot miura at postgrad dot manchester dot ac dot uk
Graduated:
Linda van Bergen, "Pronouns and word order in Old English, with particular reference to the indefinite pronoun man". PhD 2000 (published in series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics, Routledge, 2003), followed by three-year British Academy post-doctoral fellowship. Lectureship at Edinburgh. E-mail: l.vanbergen@ed.ac.uk.
Willem Hollmann (joint supervision with Bill Croft), "Synchrony and diachrony of English periphrastic causatives: A cognitive perspective". PhD 2003. Lectureship at Lancaster.
Emma Moore (joint supervision with Richard Hogg), "Learning style and identity: A sociolinguistic analysis of a high school". PhD 2003. Lectureship at Sheffield.
Petra Storjohann (joint supervision with Martin Durrell), "Diachronic comparative lexical field analysis of verbs of locomotion from Old High German and Old English to the present: A paradigmatic and syntagmatic approach". PhD 2001 (published Peter Lang, 2003). Petra is now at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim (IDS).
Junichi Toyota, "Diachronic change in the passive: Conceptual development and gradience". PhD 2004. Post at Lund University.
Makoto Yamashita, "On the history of synthetic compounds in English". PhD 2002. Mak, who is retired, is back in Japan. E-mail: makyamas@ma3.seikyou.ne.jp.
Nuria Yáñez Bouza, "Preposition stranding and prescriptivism in English from 1500 to 1900: A corpus-based approach". PhD 2007. Lectureship at Manchester.
Post-docs
Philip Wallage (PhD York) was ESRC post-doctoral fellow 2005-6 and Simon Research Fellow 2006-8. Lectureship at Northumbria.
Publications:
Click the highlighted link to view a list of selected publications.
Professional biography:
After an undergraduate degree at Cambridge (Mathematics, then Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic) I did a doctorate at Oxford. I have been at Manchester for a long time, with a chair since 1995, and the named Smith chair since 2008. I am currently Postgraduate Research Director for the School. For the period 2008-2011, I am President of the International Society for the Linguistics of English.
Visiting positions:
2006 Institut du Monde anglophone, Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle (Visiting Professor, and continuing as associate member of Groupe de Recherches en Linguistique Anglaise SESYLIA).
1998 Dpto. Filoloxia Inglesa e Alemana, University of Santiago de Compostela (Visiting Professor).
1992 Department of English, University of British Columbia (Visiting Professor).
1985-86 Engels Seminarium, University of Amsterdam (Gastdocent).
Editorships:
1995- Founding editor (with Bas Aarts and Richard Hogg) of the journal English Language and Linguistics, launched by C.U.P. in 1997.
1996-2004 General editor (with R. H. Robins and Geoffrey Horrocks) of Longman Linguistics Library.
Teaching Areas:
At undergraduate level I teach course units on the history and structure of English, including particular historical periods and present-day grammar.
At postgraduate level I also teach courses on historical linguistics, grammatical change, methodology and corpus linguistics.
Page last updated 23 August 2009.
Non-academic link: Saddleworth Beer Walk