vCardProf. Karen Corrigan

Prof. Karen Corrigan
Prof of Linguistics & English Language

Research Interests

Dialectology, sociolinguistics and sociology of language, Celtic Englishes, corpus linguistics, history of English, discourse analysis.

(1) The investigation of Irish-English from a socio-historical contact-linguistic perspective. The main strands of this research are:

(a) The residual effects on the syntax of a contemporary English dialect of historical contact between speakers of languages (vernacular Ulster Irish and Northern dialects of Early Modern English/Older Scots) which exhibit cross-linguistic differences;

(b) Measuring and defining community bilingualism in historical contact settings and exploring the social factors (particularly those pertaining to demography) believed to be significant for non-pathological language attrition in the Celtic nations and elsewhere;

(c) Tracing the social trajectories of syntactic variation in non-standard dialects and postulating the various mechanisms by which linguistic change and dialect convergence/divergence may be transmitted (particularly by female speakers);

(d) Exploring the importance of socially-situated language samples for refining and assessing theoretical models of language and evaluating the benefits to a variationist approach that accounts for linguistic change as being socially-motivated but constrained in some of its aspects by the operation of the language faculty;

(e) Determining the efficacy of 'real' time versus 'apparent' time methodologies in sociolinguistic investigations.

(2) My other major research interest is in the analysis of written and spoken corpora of various kinds. My expertise in this area was initially stimulated by the unique nature of the historical database which I collected and analysed in my doctoral dissertation on South Armagh English:

(a) I have also been a principal investigator on two externally-funded projects which analysed a spoken corpus of L2 child data: "Working With Bilingual Children" and a written corpus produced by native-speaking adult psychiatric patients: "An Analysis of the Written Discourse in the Questionnaire Responses of Personality Disordered Patients".

(b) I have just finished acting as principal investigator on an AHRC-funded project which aimed to create and analyse an electronic 'megacorpus' of Tyneside English: "The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of English." (See: www.ncl.ac.uk/necte)

(3) Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social:

I have also just completed a funded study (BC/NWO) with Leonie Cornips of the Meertens Institute, Amsterdam. This was a comparative and inter-disciplinary research project based on grammatical data drawn from distinctive regional language varieties in the Netherlands and Northern Ireland (Heerlen Dutch and South Armagh English, respectively). It resulted in a 2005 publication entitled "Convergence and Divergence in Grammar" and our collaboration evolved into a book-length work (also published in 2005) addressing issues of syntax and variation from the perspectives of various sub-disciplines of linguistics.

(4) I have additional interests in Modern (particularly, Ulster) Irish, Old English, Middle English and Early Modern English languages and texts. I have also done research on L2 English where the L1 was a member of the Indo-Aryan language family.

Selected Publications

More Publications

Postgraduate Supervision

I am interested in supervising research in the following areas: Celtic Englishes/Discourse Analysis/Historical (English) Linguistics/Tyneside English/Sociolinguistics/Sociology of Language. Suggestions for Inter-disciplinary projects are also welcome.

Esteem Indicators

(h) editorial roles, e.g. editor or member of editorial board (for refereed journals or book series):

(i) Member of the advisory board for ‘Dialects of English' series, published by Edinburgh University Press.
(ii) Member of the editorial board for English World Wide, published by John Benjamins.

(i)/(k) regular refereeing work for publishers and journals:

Regular referee for:

(i) JOURNALS: Journal of Sociolinguistics;English World-Wide.

(ii) PUBLISHERS: Blackwell; Cambridge University Press; Edinburgh University Press; Palgrave-Macmillan.

(j) membership of research sponsor evaluation panels (e.g. AHRB/C,British Academy, ESRC) or refereeing research grant applications:

Refereeing research grant applications for: AHRB/C; British Academy; Carnegie Trust; ESRC; Leverhulme Trust.

(l) professional service to the subject community, e.g. serving as chair, officer, or committee member of a learned society or association.

AHRC nominee on the Steering Committee for the Phase 2 AHRC Research Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies, based at the University of Aberdeen and involving staff at, Aberdeen University, Queen’s University, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin.

(n) participation in overseas research assessment activities:

Assessor for Council for the Humanities of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

(o) external examining for research degrees:

External examiner for research degrees at Queen Mary, University of London and at the Universities of Leeds, York and Trinity College, Dublin.

Qualifications

BA (NUI: University College, Dublin,), PhD (NUI: University College, Dublin)