Staff Profile

Office

• Percy Building, Room 3.12

Consultation & Feedback Hours

• Consultation and feedback hours are posted on the SELLL School website, here.

Qualifications

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

Semester 1, 2023-2024

• SEL3441 - Medieval and Early Modern Meaning: English Historical Semantics [undergraduate]
• SEL8700 - English Historical Semantics [postgraduate]
• SEL8543 - Manuscript, Print, Digital [postgraduate]

Semester 2, 2022-2023

• SEL1004 - Introduction to Literary Studies II [undergraduate]
• SEL2219 - Monsters, Misery & Miracles: Heroic Life in Old English Poetry [undergraduate]

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, especially in relation to the Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE; website here)
• Corpus linguistic methods and corpus construction

• Articles

  • Buchstaller I, Mearns AJ, Auer A, Krause-Lerche A. Exploring age-related changes in the realisation of (t): Panel research from Tyneside. English World-Wide 2022, 43(3), 297-329.
  • Mearns AJ. This, that and the other: locating the supernatural enemy in Old English. English Language and Linguistics 2015, 19(2), 213-226.

• Book Chapters

  • Levon E, Buchstaller I, Mearns AJ. Towards an Integrated Model of Perception: Linguistic Architecture and the Dynamics of Sociolinguistic Cognition. In: Beaman, KV; Buchstaller, I; Fox, S; Walker, JA, ed. Advancing Socio-grammatical Variation and Change: In Honour of Jenny Cheshire. New York: Routledge, 2020, pp.32-54.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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. Tyneside. In: Hickey, R, ed. Researching Northern English. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2015, pp.161-181.
  • 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, 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.

• Edited Book

  • Corrigan KP, Mearns AJ, ed. Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

• Online Publication

  • Corrigan KP, Buchstaller I, Mearns AJ, Moisl HL. The Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English. 2012.