Background

Office

Percy Building, Room 3.12

Consultation & Feedback Hours

If you would like to meet with me at another time, please email for an appointment.

Qualifications

BA English Language (1997), MA Anglo-Saxon Studies (1999), PhD (2003) - Newcastle

Research

Research Interests

The history of the English language (especially the lexicon / lexical semantics); Old English language and literature; language variation and change in the North East of England; corpus linguistic methods and corpus construction.

Teaching

Semester 1, 2019-2020

SEL2219 - Monsters, Misery and Miracles: Heroic Life in Old English Poetry (with Dr Niamh Kehoe-Rouchy) [undergraduate]

SEL3341 - Old English: Texts and Translations (module leader) [undergraduate]

Semester 2, 2019-2020

SEL1004 - Introduction to Literary Studies II (lectures on Beowulf) [undergraduate]

SEL1032 - Language Variation and Change: Dealing with Data [undergraduate]

SEL2212 - Early English: Texts, Patterns and Varieties (module leader) (with Dr William van der Wurff and Prof. Karen Corrigan) [undergraduate]

SEL8361 - The Social History of English (module leader) (with Dr William van der Wurff and Prof. Karen Corrigan) [postgraduate]

SEL8543 - Manuscript, Print, Digital (with Dr Ruth Connolly and Dr Aditi Nafde) [postgraduate]

Publications

• Buchstaller I, Mearns AJ. The Effect of Economic Trajectory and Speaker Profile on Lifespan Change: Evidence from Stative Possessives on Tyneside. In: Braber,N;Jansen,S, ed. Sociolinguistics in England. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, pp.215-241.
• Corrigan KP, Mearns AJ, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
• Corrigan KP, Mearns AJ. Taming Digital Texts, Voices and Images for the Wild: Models and Methods for Handling Unconventional Corpora to Engage the Public. In: Corrigan, KP; Mearns, AJ, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora - Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp.1-21.
• Mearns AJ, Corrigan KP, Buchstaller I. The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English and The Talk of the Toon: Issues in Preservation and Public Engagement. In: Corrigan, KP; Mearns, AJ, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora - Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp.177-120.
• Mearns AJ. This, that and the other: locating the supernatural enemy in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 2015, 19(2), 213-226.
• Mearns AJ. Tyneside. In: Hickey, R, ed. Researching Northern English. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2015, pp.161-181.
• Corrigan KP, Mearns AJ, Moisl HL. Feature-based versus aggregate analyses of the DECTE corpus: Phonological and morphological variability in Tyneside English. In: Szmrecsanyi, B; Walchli, B, ed. Aggregating Dialectology, Typology, and Register Analysis: Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter, 2014, pp.113-149.
• Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Mearns AJ, Moisl HL. The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English: Annotation practices and dissemination strategies. In: Durand, J; Gut, U; Kristoffersen, G, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Corpus Phonology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp.517-533.
• Corrigan KP, Buchstaller I, Mearns AJ, Moisl HL. The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. 2012.