I specialise in historical linguistics and language variation and change, and in theoretical and dialect syntax, working primarily on material from Celtic and Slavonic languages and English. I am interested in the mechanisms of syntactic variation and change, in syntactic reconstruction, and in the use of electronic corpora in historical linguistics. I am currently working on CURLEW, the Census of Urban and Rural Language in England and Wales (Swiss National Science Foundation), with colleagues in Bern and York. My previous research projects include the Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language, the Syntactic Atlas of Welsh Dialects, the History of Negation in the Languages of European and the Mediterranean. I directed Tweetolectology, a project to map dialect variation in English, Welsh and a number of other languages using social-media data, and an AHRC-DFG project with colleagues at Humboldt University Berlin to examine the history of pronominal subjects in the Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic languages of northern Europe.
Links
Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics
Undergraduate Teaching
Celtic languages and linguistics, History of the English language
Graduate Teaching
Celtic languages and linguistics, History of the English language, Language Variation and Change, Historical Linguistics, Syntax
I have been a member of the Council of the Philological Society and have recently stepped down as an associate editor of Language, journal of the Linguistic Society of America. I have been a member of the editorial board of Journal of Linguistics, Linguistic Variation, Journal of Historical Syntax and Journal of Celtic Linguistics. I have also been honorary secretary and membership secretary of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain.
Academic Background
MA Oxford (Russian and German) (1991)
MPhil. Oxford (General Linguistics) (1993)
DPhil. Oxford on word order in the history of Welsh (1996)
Mary Somerville Junior Research Fellow (Somerville College, Oxford) (1994–97)
British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Jesus College, Oxford) (1997–98)
Lecturer at the University of Manchester (1998–2000)
Lecturer, senior lecturer and reader at the University of Cambridge and fellow of Selwyn College (2000–2020)
Selected Publications
Comparative Brittonic syntax. In J. F. Eska, S. Nurmio, P. Ó Muircheartaigh & P. Russell (eds.), Palgrave handbook of Celtic languages and linguistics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026, 1175–1202.
Transmission and diffusion of syntactic change. In A. Ledgeway, E. Aldridge, A. Breitbarth, K. É. Kiss, J. Salmons & A. Simonenko (eds.), The Wiley–Blackwell companion to diachronic linguistics. Chichester: Wiley–Blackwell, 2026, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119898023.wbcdl116.
Welsh-English social-media lexicon in comparative context: Adjectives of positive evaluation and terms of address. In Natalie Braber & Rhys Sandow (eds.), Sociolinguistic approaches to lexical variation in English. London: Routledge, 2025, 58–84.
The diachrony of Welsh subject pronouns. Studia Celtica Posnaniensia 9 (2024), 84–111. https://doi.org/10.14746/scp.2024.9.7.
Welsh. In S. Fox (ed.), Language in Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024, 333–356. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108769617.020.
The History of Negation in the Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. Volume II: Patterns and Processes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
The Syntax of Welsh. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
