Professor Karen Corrigan

Prof of Linguistics & English Language

Email: k.p.corrigan@ncl.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 7757
Address: School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Percy Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle, NE1 7RU, Uk.

Background

Qualifications:

BA: Joint Honours in Old and Middle English (NUI: University College, Dublin);

PhD in English Language: “The Syntax of South Armagh English in its Socio-Historical Perspective” (NUI: University College, Dublin).

Esteem Indicators:

(a) Editorial Roles:

• Series Editor for the ‘Dialects of English' series, published by Edinburgh University Press, 2010-2011 and published by Mouton de Gruyter, 2011-present.

• Member of the Advisory Board for the ‘Dialects of English' series, published by Edinburgh University Press, 2003-2010.

(b) Invitations to Assess, Consult, Examine and Review:

• JOURNALS: Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory; English Language & Linguistics; English World-Wide; Folia Linguistica; International Journal of Bilingualism; International Journal of Corpus Linguistics; Journal of Sociolinguistics; Literary and Linguistic Computing; Topics in Language Disorders; Transactions of the Philological Society; Language Variation and Change.

• PUBLISHERS: Blackwell; Cambridge University Press; Edinburgh University Press; Palgrave-Macmillan.

• RESEARCH COUNCILS/TRUSTS: AHRB/C; Austrian Science Fund; British Academy; Carnegie Trust; Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences; ESRC; Leverhulme Trust; Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research; Royal Society of Edinburgh; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

• ASSOCIATIONS: British Association of Applied Linguistics, Yearly Book Prize, 2000.

• INSTITUTIONS: External assessor for MA in Linguistics proposal, Queen Mary, University of London (March 2011); External assessor on Senior Lecturer appointment committee, University College Dublin (July 2007); External assessor for promotion application to full chair at University of Toronto (December 2006); External Examiner of undergraduate programmes, Queen Mary, University of London (2002-2005); External Examiner of undergraduate programmes, University of Sheffield (2003-2006); External Examiner of postgraduate programmes, University of Essex (2009-2011); External examiner of research degrees, University of Leeds, 2011 & 2012, University of Toronto, 2011, Queen Mary, University of London, 2007, Leiden University, 2003, Trinity College, Dublin, 2002, University of York, 2001; Consultant to Dr Matthew Patrick, Developmental Psychopathology Research Unit, Adult Department, The Tavistock Clinic and University College, University of London (1995-1996).

(c) Professional Service

• LAGB Nominee on the AHRC’s Peer Review College, 2011-present.

• Member of the Humanities Institute of Ireland Advisory Board, 2010-2013.

• 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, Queen’s University, Belfast and Trinity College, Dublin, 2006-2010.

Research

Research Interests

Celtic Englishes, Corpus Linguistics, Dialectology, Discourse Analysis, History of English, Sociolinguistics and
the Sociology of Language.

(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.

These interests have recently culminated in an AHRC-funded project entitled The Empire Speaks Back which resulted in a 2010 monograph and accompanying website: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/dialects/ni.html .

(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 acted as principal investigator on two AHRC-funded projects that aimed to create and analyse an electronic 'megacorpus' of North Eastern English for different audiences. "The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of English (NECTE)" (2001-2005): http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte and "The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE)" (2010-2012): http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte were designed primarily for academics in the arts and humanities and social sciences. The most recent corpus building project aimed: (i) to ensure that NECTE was updated so that it has the greatest chance of longer-term preservation/sustainability; (ii) to add new interview data to NECTE from other areas of the North East and from speakers with different socio-demographic characteristics; (iii) to expand the accessibility/impact of the corpus so that new audiences could engage with it. This has resulted in the ‘Talk of the Toon’ website: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon aimed at local community groups. including primary and secondary school teachers and their students.

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

I have also undertaken 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 two 2005 article-length publications and our collaboration also involved a book-length work (also published in 2005) addressing issues of syntax and variation from the perspectives of various sub-disciplines of linguistics: http://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/cilt.265. I continue to be involved in research on dialect syntax via the Edisyn network: http://www.dialectsyntax.org/wiki/Welcome and I have just completed a series of pilot projects in this area involving other colleagues at Newcastle and Edinburgh Univerisities as well as University College, Dublin.

(4) Languages:

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.

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.

Publications

Corrigan KP. Linguistic Communities Connected by Migratory Processes. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2019. In Preparation.
Corrigan KP. Corpora for Regional and Social Analysis. In: Montgomery, C. and Moore, E, ed. Language and a Sense of Place: Studies in Language and Region. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
Amador-Moreno C, Corrigan KP, McCafferty K, Moreton E. Migration Databases as Impact Tools in the Education and Heritage Sectors. In: Corrigan, KP; Mearns, AJ, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora - Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp.25-67.
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.
Buchstaller I, Corrigan KP. Morphosyntactic features of Northern English. In: Hickey, R, ed. Researching Northern Englishes. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015, pp.71-98.
Childs C, Harvey C, Corrigan KP, Tagliamonte SA. ‘Comparative sociolinguistic insights in the evolution of negation’. 2015.
Corrigan KP. ‘“I always think of people here, you know, saying ‘like’ after every sentence”: The dynamics of discourse-pragmatic markers in Northern Irish English. In: Amador-Moreno, C; McCafferty, K; and Vaughan, E, ed. Pragmatic Markers in Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015, pp.37-64.
Corrigan KP, Montgomery C. Special issue on sense of place in the history of English. English Language and Linguistics 2015, 19(2), 203-211.
Fehringer C, Corrigan KP. "You've got to sort of eh hoy the Geordie out": Modals of obligation and necessity in 50 years of Tyneside English. English Language and Linguistics 2015, 19(Special Issue 2), 355-381.
Fehringer C, Corrigan KP. "The Geordie accent has a bit of a bad reputation": internal and external constraints on stative possession in the Tyneside English of the 21st century. English Today 2015, 31(2), 38-50.
Fehringer C, Corrigan KP. The rise of the going to future in Tyneside English: evidence for further grammaticalisation. English World-Wide 2015, 36(2), 198-227.
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. The Atlantic Archipelago of the British Isles. In: Filppula, M., Klemola, J., Sharma, D, ed. Oxford Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Buchstaller I, Corrigan KP, Holmberg A, Honeybone P, Maguire W. T-to-R and the Northern Subject Rule: questionnaire-based spatial, social and structural linguistics . English Language and Linguistics 2013, 17(1), 85-128.
Corrigan KP. GOAT vowel variants in the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. In: Nevalainen, T., Traugott, E, ed. Rethinking Approaches to the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp.submitted. In Press.
Corrigan KP, Buchstaller I, Mearns AJ, Moisl HL. The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. 2012.
Corrigan KP, Edge R, Lonergan J. Is Dublin English 'Alive Alive Oh'?. In: Migge, B., Chiosain, M.N, ed. New Perspectives on Irish English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012, pp.1-28.
Buchstaller I, Corrigan KP. How to make intuitions succeed: testing methods for analysing syntactic microvariation. In: Maguire, W., McMahon, A, ed. Analysing Variation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp.30-48.
Buchstaller I, Corrigan KP. Judge not lest ye be judged: Exploring methods for the collection of socio-syntactic data. In: Gregersen, F., Parrott, J., Quist, P, ed. Language Variation - European Perspectives III. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011, pp.149-160.
Corrigan KP. Grammatical variation in Irish-English. English Today 2011, 27(2), 39-46.
Corrigan KP. The “Art of making the best use of bad data”: Mining the Irish National Folklore Collection for evidence of linguistic contact, variation and change. In: Hickey, R, ed. Researching the Languages of Ireland. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press, 2011, pp.183-205.
Corrigan KP. Irish English, volume 1 - Northern Ireland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
Corrigan KP. Grammatical Theory and Language Contact. In: Hickey, R, ed. The Handbook of Language Contact. Oxford: Blackwell, 2010, pp.106-127.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP. The Impact of Nineteenth-Century Irish English Migrations on Contemporary Northern Englishes: Tyneside and Sheffield Compared. In: Penttila, E., Paulasto, H, ed. Language Contacts Meet English Dialects: Studies in Honour of Markku Filppula. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp.231-258.
Corrigan KP. Irish Daughters of Northern British Relatives: Internal and External Constraints on the System of Relativisation in South Armagh English (SArE). In: Filppula, M., Klemola, J., Paulasto, H, ed. Vernacular Universals and Language Contacts: Evidence from Varieties of English and Beyond. London and New York: Routledge, 2009, pp.133-162.
Allen W, Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Maguire W, Moisl HL. A linguistic 'time-capsule': The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. In: Beal, JC; Corrigan, KP; Moisl, HL, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Diachronic Databases. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp.16-48.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP. 'Time and Tyne': a corpus-based study of variation and change in relativization strategies in Tyneside English. In: Elspaß, S; Langer, N; Scarloth, J; Vandenbussche, W, ed. Germanic Language Histories 'from Below' (1700-2000). Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2007, pp.99-114.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Moisl HL. Taming Digital Voices and Texts: models and methods for handling unconventional diachronic corpora. In: Beal, JC; Corrigan, KP; Moisl, HL, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora: Diachronic Databases. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp.1-15.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Moisl HL, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 1: Synchronic Databases. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Moisl HL, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora, Volume 2: Diachronic Databases. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Rayson P, Smith N. Writing the vernacular: Transcribing and tagging the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE). University of Helsinki: The Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English (VARIENG), 2007. Available at: http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/journal/volumes/01/beal_et_al/.
Kretzchmar W, Anderson J, Beal JC, Corrigan KP, Opas-Hänninen L, Plichta B. Collaboration on Corpora for Regional and Social Analysis. Journal of English Linguistics 2006, 34(3), 172-205.
Cornips L, Corrigan KP, ed. Syntax and variation: reconciling the biological and the social. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP. A Tale of Two Dialects: Relativization in Newcastle and Sheffield. In: Filppula M; Klemola J; Palander M; Penttilä E, ed. Dialects Across Borders: Selected papers from the 11th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI), Joensuu, August 2002. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, pp.211-229.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP. No, Nay, Never: Negation in Tyneside English. In: Iyeiri, Y, ed. Aspects of English Negation. Tokyo and Amsterdam: Yushodo Press and John Benjamins, 2005, pp.139-156.
Cornips L, Corrigan KP. Convergence and divergence in grammar. In: Auer, P., Hinskens, F., Kerswill, P, ed. Dialect Change : Convergence and Divergence in European Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp.96-134.
Cornips L, Corrigan KP. Toward an Integrated Approach to Syntactic Variation: a retrospective and prospective synopsis. In: Cornips, L.; Corrigan, K.P, ed. Syntax and Variation: Reconciling the Biological and the Social. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005, pp.1-30.
Corrigan KP. The ideology of nationalism and its impact on accounts of language shift in nineteenth century Ireland. AAA: Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 2003, 28(2), 201-229.
Corrigan KP. For-to Infinitives and Beyond : Interdisciplinary Approaches to Non-Finite Complementation in a Rural Celtic English. In: Tristram H.L.C, ed. The Celtic Englishes III. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag Winter GmbH Heidelberg, 2003, pp.318-338.
Beal JC, Corrigan KP. Relativisation in Tyneside English. In: Poussa, P, ed. Relativisation on the North Sea Littoral. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2002, pp.33-56.
Antonini R, Corrigan KP, Wei Li. The Irish Language in the Republic of Ireland and in Northern Ireland. In: Ammon, U., Mattheier, K.J., Nelde, P, ed. Language Policy and Small Languages, Special Issue of Sociolinguistica: International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2002, pp.118-128.
Corrigan KP. "What Bees to Be Maun Be": Aspects of deontic and epistemic modality in a northern dialect of Irish English. English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English 2000, 21(1), 25-62.
Verma MK, Corrigan KP, Firth SA. Minority Children’s Heritage Language: Planning for non-preservation?. In: Wynn Thomas, P., Mathias, J, ed. Developing Minority Languages: The Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Minority Languages. Cardiff, UK: Department of Welsh, Cardiff University, 2000, pp.506-529.
Corrigan KP. What are 'Small Clauses' Doing in South Armagh English, Irish and Planter English?. In: Tristram, H.L.C, ed. Celtic Englishes II. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2000, pp.75-96.
Corrigan KP. Language Contact and Language Shift in County Armagh, 1178-1659. In: Mallory, J, ed. Linguistic Diversity in Ulster, Special Issue of Ulster Folklife. Holywood, County Down, Northern Ireland: Museums & Galleries of Northern Ireland, 1999, pp.54-69.
Corrigan KP. The Acquisition and Properties of a Contact Vernacular Grammar. In: Ahlqvist , A., Capková, V, ed. Dán Do Oide: Essays in Memory of Conn R. Ó Cleirigh. Dublin: The Linguistics Institute of Ireland, 1997, pp.75-93.
Corrigan KP. Language contact and language shift in County Armagh, 1178-1659. Ulster Folklife 1999, 45, 54-69.
Corrigan KP. Plain Life Depicted in 'Fiery Shorthand': sociolinguistic aspects of the languages and dialects of Ulster and Scotland as portrayed in Scott's Waverley (1814) and Banim's The Boyne Water (1826). Scottish Language 1996, 14/15, 218-233.
Verma MK, Corrigan KP, Firth SA, ed. Working With Bilingual Children. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1995.
Verma MK, Corrigan KP, Firth SA. Issues in the Language Education of Bilingual Children. In: Verma, M.K., Corrigan, K.P., Firth, S.A, ed. Working with Bilingual Children: Good Practice in Primary Classrooms. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1995, pp.94-108.
Corrigan KP. I gcuntas Dé múin Béarla do na leanbhain: Eisimirce agus an Ghaeilge sa naoú aois deag. In: O' Sullivan, P, ed. The Irish in the New Communities. Leicester, UK: Leicester University Press, 1992, pp.143-161.
Verma MK, Corrigan KP, Firth SA. The Developing Phonological Systems of Panjabi/Urdu Speaking Children Learning English as a Second Language in Britain. In: New Sounds 1992, Proceedings of a Symposium on the Acquisition of Second Languages. 1992, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: University of Amsterdam.
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. Vignette 12c: Working with ‘unconventional’ existing data sources. In: Data Collection in Sociolinguistics: Methods and Applications. Taylor and Francis, 2013, pp.213-216.