Staff Profile
I have degrees in literature and language from the universities of Kent, Edinburgh and Leeds and have worked at various schools and universities in the UK and abroad. I am the author of two books: The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies and North East Vernacular English Online (Edinburgh University Press).
My main areas of research are in sociolinguistics and dialectology (particularly in relation to North East England). My research website is Dialectological Landscapes of North East England.
Books
2024 North East Vernacular English Online. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2007 The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies. London: Routledge.
Book chapters
2017 The Linguistic Landscape of North East England, in Joan Beal and Sylvie Hancil (eds), Perspectives on Northern Englishes. Amsterdam: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 61-82.
2006 Literature and Creativity in English (with Janet Maybin), in Sharon Goodman and Kieran O’Halloran (eds), The Art of English: Literary Creativity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 3-48.
Journal articles
2021 The Participatory Vernacular Web and Regional Dialect Grammar. English Today 37(4): 196-205.
2020 The Survival of Traditional Dialect Lexis on the Participatory Web. English Studies 101(4): 487-509.
2015 The Ethnonym Geordie in North East England. Names: A Journal of Onomastics 63(2): 75-84.
2015 Mam or mum? Sociolinguistic Awareness and Language-ideological Debates Online. Sociolinguistic Studies 9 (1): 115-136.
2014 “Not Quite a Geordie”: The Folk-Ethnonyms of North East England. Nomina 37: 1-34.
2014 Key Function Words in a Corpus of UK Election Propaganda. Linguistik Online 65: 23-44.
2013 “That word so fraught with meaning”: The History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny in North East England. English Studies 94 (5): 562-581.
2012 Folk-accounts of Dialect Differences in Tyne and Wear. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 20: 5-25.
2011 Exploring a Perceptual Dialect Boundary in North East England. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 19: 3-22.
2011 “It isn’t geet good, like, but it’s canny”: A New(ish) Dialect Feature in North East England. English Today 27 (3): 1-7.
2009 A Perceptual Dialect Map of North East England. Journal of English Linguistics 37 (2): 162-192.
2008 Investigating the Collocational Behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC Using Sketch Engine. Corpora 3 (1): 1-29.
2005 Informalization in UK Party Election Broadcasts 1966-1997. Language and Literature 14 (1): 65-90. (Winner of the 2005 Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) Prize.)
2004 The Marketization of Discourse about Education in UK General Election Manifestos. TEXT 24 (2): 245-265.
2001 “Getting Behind the Image”: Personality Politics in a Labour Party Election Broadcast. Language and Literature 10 (3): 211-228.
I do not teach at Newcastle University.