Prof. Manfred Markus (University of Innsbruck): Selected Features of Spokenness in Late Modern English: A survey based on Joseph Wright’s EDD (online)

Professor Manfred Markus (University of Innsbruck) is a specialist in English historical and corpus linguistics, with research and teaching interests also in Dialectology, Varieties of English and Middle English Literature. He was chairholder for English Linguistics and Medieval English Literature at the University of Innsbruck from 1981 to 2009, Director of the Innsbruck project that created the English Dialect Dictionary Online, and Visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Trento, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, the University of Dresden and the University of Turku. His numerous publications include Mittelenglisches Studienbuch (Tübingen 1990) and Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: A Multi-dimensional Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2012; co-edited with Yoko Iyeiri, Reinhard Heuberger and Emil Chamson).

Selected Features of Spokenness in Late Modern English: A survey based on Joseph Wright’s EDD (online)

This lecture will demonstrate that English dialects, as represented by Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (EDD), are a treasure trove of spoken features of language. I will first argue that spokenness should generally count more in linguistics, particularly in historical linguistics concerning most levels of the language system and practically all aspects of usage. Then we will be concerned with the LModE period, when most people were still illiterate and therefore mainly communicated by spoken words. The major part of the lecture will discuss different types of spoken features, from pronunciation and prosody to pragmatics and idioms, and the way they can conveniently be retrieved in EDD Online.