Research

Current research interests:

• Descriptive levels: Phonetics/phonology, morphology, syntax
• Historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics
• Varieties of English around the world
• Pidgin and Creole languages
• Sociolinguistics
• Dialectology
• Corpus linguistics

Completed projects:

• The Old Bailey Corpus - Spoken English in the 18th and 19th centuries.
• Integrating the Old Bailey Corpus into the CLARIN-D infrastructure
  

Major on-going projects:

• International Corpus of English: ICE-Ghana
• Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT). The Database of Early Pidgin and Creole Texts (DEPiCT), funded by the German Science Foundation, assembles early attestations and descriptions of contact languages. The texts are annotated and made searchable online.

Conference and workshop organisation:

• Seventh Creolistics Workshop: "Simplicity and complexity in pidgins and creoles"
  University of Giessen, Germany, 6-8 April 2006
• Eighth Creolistics Workshop: "Pidgins and creoles in a comparative perspective"
  University of Giessen, Germany, 2-4 April 2009
  
• Workshop: "The compilation of the spoken components of ICE: theory and practice"
  University of Giessen, Germany, 5-9 April 2010 (with Prof. Joybrato Mukherjee)
• ICAME 31: "Corpus linguistics and variation in English"
  University of Giessen, Germany, 26-30 May 2010 (with Prof. Joybrato Mukherjee)
• Workshop: "Investigating Earlier Spoken English. Papers based on the Old Bailey Corpus"
  Pre-conference workshop at 31st Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Giessen, Germany, 26 May 2010
• Summer Meeting of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics (SPCL)
  University of Ghana, 2-6 August 2011
  with Prof. John Singler, New York University, and Dr. Kofi Yakpo, University of Nijmegen
• Eleventh Creolistics Workshop: "Assessing old assumptions. New insights on the dynamics of contact languages"
  University of Giessen, Germany, 23-25 March 2017