Historical Variation and Change Cluster

The Historical Variation and Change Cluster brings together linguists interested in exploring how language adapts itself to its different contexts of use (place, socio-cultures, time, domains) and the extent to which those processes of adaptation may lead to processes of language change.

Another common interest of all researchers in this cluster is corpus linguistics: several members have developed or are involved in the development of historical corpora and/or corpus software. The cluster has particular strengths in historical dialectology, nineteenth-century letter-writing, syntactic and semantic change, identity and migration in early and late modern English and historical stylistics.

Key areas of interest are as follows:

• Enregisterment in varieties of English, with particular reference to the Yorkshire dialect
• Historical ego-documents (personal letters, diaries and first-person narratives)
• ‘Brain-drain’: academic migration in the UK
• The language of Jane Austen and her contemporaries
• The history and development of the Noun Phrase
• Language and Identity in the Early Modern English period
• Digital Humanities

Members of this cluster include:

• Paul Cooper
• Victorina González-Díaz
• Caterina Guardamagna
• Emma Moreton
• Ursula Kania

Cluster Lead: Caterina Guardamagna