Researchers

The AMC has hosted a number of researchers since its founding in 2014, either as staff on AMC-based grants or as visiting scholars. Here are some of them.

Current AMC Researchers

Alpo_photoDr Alpo Honkapohja

"A Corpus Approach to Manuscript Abbreviations"

Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) grant
And
Research Assistant on the AMC's FITS Project
2017-2020
Alpo Honkapohja completed his PhD at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, in October 2013, where he was based six years working for the Medieval Latin from Anglo-Saxon Sources project. He is originally from Finland and carried out his undergraduate studies at the University of Helsinki. His first monograph, Alchemy, Medicine, and Commercial Book Production
A Codicological and Linguistic Study of the Voigts-Sloane Manuscript Group
was published in April 2017.
Honkapohja arrived in Edinburgh in September 2017 to work on a post-doctoral project called A Corpus Approach to Manuscript Abbreviations (CAMA). The purpose of the project is to examine the development of manuscript abbreviations, using a quantitative approach. Scribes, in a handwritten book culture, made use of a number of abbreviations to save space or time. These can exhibit regional variation, as the scribes in a certain area acquired their scribal practices from a local writing centre, such as monastic scriptorium or an administrative office responsible for certain kinds of documents. This type of variation can be used as data for quantitative approaches. The project looks at the specific case of manuscript abbreviations to study scribal and regional variation.
The data comes from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middlel English (LAEME), a corpus of ca. 650,000 divided into scribal samples of localised Middle English. The corpus contains the level of detail required with respect to abbreviations in its encoding system. The methodology incorporates tried and tested statistical approaches to corpus data, such as linear regression and linear correlation.
The project aims to address four main research questions:

(Q1) Does each scribe have an individual (scribal) profile of abbreviations?
(Q2) Are some abbreviations connected to certain geographic areas?
(Q3) How are Latin and Old English abbreviations distributed in Germanic and Romance vocabulary?
(Q4) What is the function of abbreviations in the spelling system(s) of Middle English?

Upon completion of his SNF grant, Alpo joined the FITS project, helping to trace the spelling and sound histories of Older Scots documentary materials.
IMG_9053Dr Benjamin Molineaux

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow working on the grant "Digital methods in New-World language change: Words & sounds in older Mapudungun"
and
Research Assistant on the AMC's FITS Project
2014-2021
Ben's interests are in synchronic and diachronic phonology and morphology, with special emphasis on stress systems. He has published on these topics as applied to the history of English, Scots and Mapudungun (spoken in Chile and Argentina).
As one of the compilers of the From Inglis To Scots (FITS) database he has applied corpus methods to mapping the earliest sound-to-spelling correspondences in the history of Scots (1380-500). He is currently using the same methods to explore the 400-year history of Mapudungun, as part of the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun.
He holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford.

 

Past AMC Researchers

2017-2019 Dr Rafaella Baechler
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant
"Exaptation in the nominal inflection of early Middle English"
thumbnail_P1000496
2017-2018Dr Mayumi Sawada
Visiting Researcher
Aichi Gakuin University (Japan)
2014-2017Dr Joanna Kopaczyk
Research Assistant on the AMC's FITS Project
Joanna is currently Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics in the School of Critical Studies, The University of Glasgow
joanna

 

For graduate students that have been hosted at the AMC, see Students.