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: and (Edinburgh University Press).
My main areas of research are in sociolinguistics and dialectology (particularly in relation to North East England). My research website is .
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 Â鶹´«Ã½.