Research News, February to August 2017, part 2

Before term started, we presented Part 1 of what our staff have been up to in the first two thirds of 2017. Here, we are happy to report on the other half!

Melanie Green has recently become an editor for the London Oriental and African Language Library series for John Benjamins Publishers, after submitting her co-authored book for that series, a comprehensive grammar of Cameroon Pidgin English. In March, Melanie was external examiner for Chikelu Ezenwafor's PhD at the University of Pisa :A grammatical description of Etulo, a Benue-Congo language of Nigeria.< PhD, Scuola Normale Superiore, University of Pisa. Her new PhD student (and returning Sussexer) Sarah Fitzgerald has received a CHASE studentship for her project: Evaluating Processability Theory as an explanation for creole features: a corpus-based case study of Cameroon Pidgin English. Best of luck to them both!

The Horsdean site
Roberta Piazza has presented her work at several conferences At the American Association for Applied Linguistics (Portland, Oregon) in March, she gave the paper Exploring the place-identity of individuals in unsettled communities: a case study of a London squatter. She shared this research at the Brighton Catalyst Club in April.  In May she was in Łódź for Personal Identity through a Language Lens, where she presented The discursive construction of others as a means to define space identity in an Irish travellers’ site. At the end of June, Roberta was at the Postmillennial Sensibility in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media Conference in Kosice, Ideology in the multimodal discourse of television documentaries on Irish traveller communities in the UK: a mixed portrayal. At the Mass Observation Archive 80th Anniversary conference in July, she spoke on Categorising the homeless through personal narratives.
Dr Paul Fisher Davies

In June, Roberta organised an open event at the Horsdean travellers site with talks, conversations and fun to celebrate the anniversary of the permanent site.

Congratulations to Roberta's co-supervised student, Paul Fisher Davies, on receiving the PhD. His thesis was on Making Meanings With Comics: A Functional Approach to Graphic Narrative.

Justyna Robinson has co-authored two pieces as part of the Linguistic DNA project: Linguistic DNA: Investigating conceptual change in early Modern English discourse has appeared in Studia Neophilologica and Reading into the past: Materials and methods in historical semantics research (in Tanja Saily, ed., Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics: Methods, Materials, Theory). The Linguistics DNA team gave several conference papers over the summer:
  • Stories of suddenness, virginity, and valiant beggars: Modelling conceptual variation and change in English, 1500–1800. (Susan Fitzmaurice, Justyna Robinson, Iona Hine, Fraser Dallachy, Marc Alexander, Seth Mehl). 11th UK Language Variation and Change, University of Cardiff.
  • The Seven Words of the Virgin: Identifying change in the discourse context of the concept of virginity in Early Modern English. (Susan Fitzmaurice, Justyna Robinson, Iona Hine, Fraser Dallachy, Kathryn Rogers, Marc Alexander, Michael Pidd, Seth Mehl, Matthew Groves and Brian Aitken ) Digital Humanities, Montreal.
  • Sudden semantics: Identifying and analysing meanings and discourses of ‘suddenness’ in 55,000 early English books (with Seth Mehl) at the 5th Biennial Conference on the Diachrony of English, Tours, France.
Justyna organised a panel session on The role of an individual speaker in linguistic change at the 5th  Biennial Conference on the Diachrony of English, University of Tours in July. There she gave her own paper Two steps forward one step back: How do individual movements shape the diachrony of English adjectives?  In August, she presented The role of self-perception in real-time change: insights from cognitive sociolinguistics at the 11th UK Language Variation and Change conference. In September, she gave a guest talk at the Collaborative Research Center at Saarbrücken University.


Justyna's also been working with Professor Tim Hitchcock (History), organising a 'data sprint' on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey at the Sussex Humanities Lab in May. With Charlotte Taylor and Fraser Dallachy, she presented Voices and concepts in The Old Bailey Proceedings.

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