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New staff for 2012

Posted on 10 April 2012

We are very pleased to announce that 3 new staff will be joining us after the summer!

Prof Dunstan Brown will join us in September 2012, moving from the University of Surrey. He will be teaching the module "English corpus linguistics" in 2012-13, and in the future is also expected to teach courses in linguistic typology, advanced morphology, and computational linguistics. He is recognised as a world leader in the Network Morphology framework, and with colleagues in Surrey he has participated in the development of Canonical Typology. His research is focussed on theoretical and computational models of linguistic variation and typology, with special reference to morphology and syntax. He is currently actively participating in a European Research Council project on Morphological Complexity, as well as two nationally funded research projects, "Endangered complexity: inflectional classes in Oto-Manguean languages" (ESRC) and "From competing theories to fieldwork: the challenge of an extreme agreement system" (AHRC), which are based on the indigenous languages of Mexico and Daghestan, respectively.

Dr Caitlin Light will join us in September 2012, after finishing her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr Light will be contributing to teaching in our English Language curriculum, with primary responsibility for developing the History of English modules at intermediate and advanced level, and using corpora in teaching and research. Her PhD study involves a diachronic and comparative study of information structure and its relation to syntactic structure in the Germanic languages. As part of this research she created a fully usable, hand-corrected parsed corpus of part of the Septembertestament, Luther's first translation of the New Testament into Early New High German, written in 1522. She has also developed a partial corpus of some sections of the Tyndale New Testament translation (Early Modern English, published 1534), complementing the existing sample in the Penn Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English, to create a parallel English sample to the Septembertestament corpus. 

Prof Giuseppe Longobardi will join us in November 2012, moving from the University of Trieste in Italy. In 2012-13 he will be teaching "Introduction to historical-comparative methods in linguistics". Prof Longobardi is a scholar of international reputation in the Principles-and-Parameters approach to grammar, and was one of the founders of the modern approach to historical syntax, which is strongly represented at York in the work of our English Language staff. Prof Longobardi is now engaging in a much wider research programme relating to the history and syntactic classification of languages. This project, starting in late 2012, is entitled "Darwin's Last Challenge" and it connects comparative grammar, historical linguistics, population genetics, computational biology, paleontology and archaeology. It is funded by a large grant from the European Research Council. Prof Longobardi expects to develop new taught modules at York which relate to these formal aspects of comparative syntax, language history and language classification.

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