Research area.

The history and development of American English, especially in the American South, from colonial times to the present. I have published extensively on many varieties of Southern American English, white and black.

The Irish and Scottish contributions to American English.

Ulster Scots and Ulster English.

The grammar and vocabulary of Appalachian English. I have edited a comprehensive dictionary of Southern Appalachian English in press. I have also prepared an extensive annotated bibliography of work in this field (http//: scholar.lib.vt.edu/iussus)

Recent and Forthcoming Publications:

Books:

2003. An Ulster-Scots Reader. Belfast: Ullans Press. (edited with Anne Smyth and Philip S. Robinson)

2003. The Knaresborough Workhouse Daybook: Life and Language in an 18th-Century Yorkshire Town. Yorkshire Dialect Society. (with María F. García-Bermejo

forthcoming 2004. The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. (with Joseph S. Hall).

forthcoming 2004. From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation.

 

Major Articles and Chapters:

1999. A Superlative Complex in Appalachian English. Southeastern Journal of Linguistics 23.1-14.

1999. Sierra Leone Settler English: Another Exported Variety of African American English. English World-Wide 20.1-34.

1999. "He Bes Took up with a Yankee Girl and Moved up North": The Verb Bes in the Carolinas and Its History. American Speech 75.1-42. (with Margaret Mishoe)

1999. The Position of Ulster Scots. Ulster Folklife 45.85-104. Special issue on language diversity in Ulster, ed. by James Mallory.

2000. Isolation as a Linguistic Construct. Southern Journal of Linguistics 1.25-36.

2000. The Problem of Persistence: Ulster-Scot-American Missing Links. Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 1.105-19.

2000. Ulster: A Linguistic Bridge across the North Atlantic. Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 1.40-60. (with Philip Robinson)

2000. The Idea of Appalachian Isolation. Appalachian Heritage 28.2.20-31.

2000. The Celtic Element in American English. Celtic Englishes II, ed. by Hildegard Tristram, 231-64. Heidelberg: Winter.

2000. The Many Faces of the Scotch-Irish. Familia 16.24-40.

2001. "My Mother, Whenever She Passed Away, She Had Pneumonia": The History and Function of Punctual whenever. Journal of English Linguistics 29.234-49. (with John M. Kirk)

2001. On the Trail of Early Nonstandard Grammar: An Electronic Corpus of Southern U.S. Antebellum Overseers' Letters. American Speech 79.388-409 (with Edgar W. Schneider).

2001. Trans-Atlantic Connections for Variable Grammatical Features. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics 7.3.205-24.

2001. Yorkshire English Two Centuries Ago. Journal of English Linguistics 29.348-62. (with Maria F Garcia-Bermejo Giner)

2001. Ulster Scots: A Language of Scotch-Irish Emigrants. Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 2.125-37.

2001. Eighteenth-Century Nomenclature for Ulster Emigrants. Journal of Scotch-Irish Studies 2.1-6.

2001. British and Irish Antecedents. Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume 6: American English, edited by John Algeo, 86-153. Cambridge University Press.

2001. On the Trail of Ulster Emigrant Letters. Atlantic Crossroads: Historical Connections between Scotland, Ulster and North America, ed. by Steve Ickringill and Patrick Fitzgerald, 13-26. Newtownards, Northern Ireland: Colourpoint.

2002. Introduction to reprint of Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, xi-lvii. (with Katherine Wyly Mille)

2003. The Scots Language Abroad, Edinburgh Companion to Scots, ed. by John Corbett et al., 233-50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

2003. The Structural History of Y'all, ?You All, and You'uns. Southern Journal of Linguistics 3.1-9.

in press. Solving Kurath's Puzzle: Establishing the Antecedents of the American Midland Dialect Region. The Legacy of Colonial English: The Study of Transported Dialects, ed. by Raymond Hickey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

in press. Ulster Scots: Lost or Submerged? Ulster and Scotland, A Common Heritage, Language, History and Literature, 1600=1200, ed. by William Kelly and John Young. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation.

in press. The English Language. High Mountains Rising, ed. by Tyler Blethen and Richard Straw. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.

in press. Historical Perspectives on the pen/pin Merger in Southern American English. Studies in the History of the English Language II: Conversations between Past and Present, ed. by Anne Curzan. (with Connie Eble)

in press. Eighteenth-Century Emigrants from Ireland to Tennessee: A Report Using First Families of Tennessee Files, Journal of East Tennessee History.

in press. Survey of Grammar of Southern Appalachian English, Major Varieties of English: Volume 3, ed. by Edgar W. Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

 

Editing and Consulting Work:

Section Editor for Language section of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia, author of section overview, and contributor of six entries.

Consulting Editor for Languages and Dialects, Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Project headquartered at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi and volume published by University of North Carolina Press.

Associate Editor, American Speech, 1996- .

Editorial Board, English World-Wide, 1997- .

Member of Advisory Committee, Museum of East Tennessee History, 2002- .

Member of Advisory Committee, Ulster-American Folk Park, 2002- .

 

Honors and Offices:

Lifetime Achievement Award, Carolina TESOL, April 1997

Honorary President, Forum for the Study of the Languages of Scotland and Ulster, 1997- .

Honorary President, Ulster-Scots Language Society, 2000- .

President, American Dialect Society, 2003-04 (Vice-President, 2001-02).

 

Last update:  06/27/03