Research Projects in English Linguistics

Ongoing Projects

ProjectShort DescriptionResearchers
Aboriginal English on Croker Island:
Morphosyntactic variation between input and innovation in a new variety of English (DFG Mercator project, project number 556482783)
This project is concerned with morphosyntactic variation in Australian Aboriginal English on Croker Island, Northern Territory, a variety characterized by a high degree of inter- and intraindividual variation (Mailhammer 2021). Based on a corpus of sociolinguistic interviews, we aim to tease apart the effects of contact-induced language change from variety-internal innovation as well as those owed to substrate influence as opposed to more general structural, discourse-pragmatic, and cognitive constraints on language use. Finally, we look into why has Croker Island not (yet) stabilized into a coherent variety, as is generally assumed for New Englishes.
  • PI: Prof. Dr. Stephanie Hackert (LMU Munich)
  • Mercator Fellow: Prof. Dr. Robert Mailhammer (Western Sydney University)
  • Ph.D. student: Sarah Potye (LMU Munich)

Completed Projects

ProjectShort DescriptionSpokespersons / PIs
DFG-Project Standardization and Language Change in Postcolonioal Speech Communities: The BahamasWhereas the creoles of the anglophone Caribbean have received a fair amount of attention in the past fifty years or so, much less is known about standards of English in the region. The proposed project aims to describe and explain the restructuring processes which have been taking place in educated Bahamian English in the postcolonial era. Two main research questions are to be answered: (1) Is the variety becoming Americanized? (2) What is the extent of the influence of the locally coexisting creole? In order to answer these questions, a representative database has been compiled using the International Corpus of English framework; this database will be supplemented by diachronic and attitude data, all of which will be subjected to rigorous quantitative (as well as qualitative) analysis.
(2026-2019)
Prof. Dr. Stephanie Hackert
Runic Writing in the Germanic Languages (RuneS) (Academies Programme)

For more information click here
Prof. Dr. Ursula Lenker

Prof. Dr. Gaby Waxenberger

Prof. Dr. Elke Ronneberger-Sibold

PD Dr. Kerstin Kazzazi

Arbeitsstelle Eichstätt-München