From Inglis to Scots » Staff

FITS Team at the 10th ICOME

Joanna Kopaczyk — Wed, 24 May 2017 16:12:21 +0000

The FITS Team will talk about “Reconstructing spelling systems through grapho-phonological parsing” at the 10th International Conference on Medieval English (ICOME) at the University of Stavanger (29.05-2.06.2017). Using the grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of sound-spelling correspondences in Older Scots, we will show how the Older Scots consonantal use of differed from contemporaneous practice south of the border. We will concentrate on spelling correlates of voiced and voiceless dental fricatives, paying special attention to positional preferences, as well as functional, etymological and morphological contexts. It’ll be an exciting opportunity to show our Medusa tool (tentatively referred to as such) at work!

FITS Team at the AMC Symposium

Joanna Kopaczyk — Tue, 24 May 2016 15:21:56 +0000

The AMC Symposium, organised by the members of the FITS team and the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, gives us a wonderful opportunity to share our research with fellow historical linguists. FITS Team members are involved in the following presentations:

Rhona Alcorn and Rob Truswell: A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English
Warren Maguire: The phonology of early nineteenth-century Tyneside English as revealed in Thomas Wilson’s The Pitman’s Pay
Benjamin Molineaux and Joanna Kopaczyk: L-vocalisation in fifteenth-century Scots: The earliest spread of a ‘characteristic’ Scots feature
Daisy Smith: The predictability of {-S} abbreviation in Older Scots manuscripts according to stem-final littera

The abstracts can be found in the Book of Abstracts, and for the full programme, see this link.

A first meeting with our advisory panel

Benjamin Molineaux — Thu, 09 Jul 2015 15:10:55 +0000

This past Thursday, 9 July, our team met with members of its advisory panel to tackle a first set of data on the question of the Germanic source of Scots. We are extremely grateful to Donka Minkova, Roger Lass, Meg Laing and Julia Fernández Cuesta for helping us hone our analyses and for sharing their wealth of knowledge. The least we could do was share a meal with them!
A revised and updated version of this work will be presented on 12 August at the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster in Ayr. Watch this space!

FITS Team at the FRLSU Conference this Summer

Benjamin Molineaux — Wed, 10 Jun 2015 15:19:27 +0000

The FITS Project will be well represented at the Forum for Research on the Languages of Scotland and Ulster’s triennial conferences, to be held between 12 and 14 August 2015 at the University of the West of Scotland Ayr Campus.

Our team will be well represented at this event, with two talks and one keynote address.
Warren Maguire (project Co-Investigator) will give a plenary on Investigating the phonological history of southwest Tyrone English

There will be two additional keynotes:

Professor Jeremy Smith (University of Glasgow), Punctuating Older Scots: new developments from a pragmatic perspective

Professor Wilson McLeod (University of Edinburgh), Purism and diversity in contemporary Gaelic

The FITS team will also deliver two talks.

Rhona Alcorn (Project Co-Investigator) will give a talk entitled Introducing FITS
Benjamin Molineaux and Joanna Kopaczyk (Project Research Assistants) will give a talk called The Germanic sources of Older Scots revisited: A featural approach

Finally, Linguistics and English Language at Edinburgh will also be represented by a talk by Pavel Iosad, Michael Ramsammy and Patrick Honeybone: Preaspiration in North Argyll Gaelic and its contribution to prosodic structure.

See the rest of the programme here.