Previous stays at FRIAS

• Oct. 2009 - March 2011

 

CV

Christian Mair was Assistant and, subsequently, Associate Professor in the English Department of the University of Innsbruck, Austria, before being appointed to a Chair in English Linguistics at the University of Freiburg in Germany in 1990. He has been involved in the compilation of several linguistic corpora (among them F-LOB and Frown and – currently in progress – a corpus of Caribbean English as part of the International Corpus of English and an extension to the ARCHER corpus). His research over the past two decades has focussed on the corpus-based description of modern English grammar and regional variation and ongoing change in standard Englishes world-wide and resulted in the publication of several monographs (among them, with CUP, Infinitival clauses in English: a study of syntax in discourse, 1990, and Twentieth-century English: history, variation, and standardization, 2006) and more than 60 contributions to scholarly journals and edited works. In addition he has produced popular introductions to the field of English linguistics – e.g. Englisch für Anglisten (1995) and a revised version of Ernst Leisi's classic Das heutige Englisch (8th edition, 1999). He has held guest professorships at the Universities of Massachusetts at Amherst, Santiago de Compostela and Zurich and, since February 2006, has been a member of the "Wissenschaftsrat," an advisory body to the German Federal Government and state governments.

 

Selected Publications

Monographs

• [with Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt and Nicholas Smith]. Recent Change in English: a Corpus-Based Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming [2009].

• Bachelor-Wissen: English Linguistics. Tübingen: Narr, 2008.

• Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: CUP, 2006.

• [with Ernst Leisi]. Das heutige Englisch. Heidelberg: Winter, 1999.

• Infinitival Complement Clauses in English. Cambridge: CUP, 1990.

Editorship

• Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. [with Marianne Hundt]

• The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies. ASNEL Papers 7. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003.

• Corpus Approaches to Grammaticalization in English. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. [with Hans Lindquist]

FRIAS Research Project

My FRIAS project "World languages – digital languages: Digital monitoring of ongoing change and diversification in English, French and Spanish" is being undertaken jointly with my Freiburg Romance colleague Stefan Pfänder and aims to investigate processes of diversification and pluricentric standardisation currently going on in three world languages. Starting out from traditional sociolinguistic/ variationist concerns such as the study of variation in face-to-face communication or in different registers or text types, we intend to extend coverage so as to include new forms of computer-mediated communication and, more generally, the mediated, strategic and frequently stylised use of non-standard varieties, as this dimension is essential to an understanding of our contemporary communicative "ecology," which is characterised by the opposing forces of worldwide linguistic homogenisation, on the one hand, and the rapid spread and high visibility of selected vernacular features and styles, on the other. Our collaboration is additionally motivated by the conviction that a systematic comparison of the development of three world-languages under the conditions of global communication will advance our theoretical understanding of the processes investigated – all the more so as previous work on "world English," or "French/ Spanish as a world language" has largely proceeded in disciplinary isolation.
Methodologically, we share a conviction that a systematic and exhaustive empirical description of linguistic variability requires the use of digital text data and associated retrieval and analysis procedures. Under this heading, we include both traditional "corpora" (i.e. databases compiled expressly for the purpose of linguistic analysis) and less well structured textual archives, including the World Wide Web. "Domesticating" the latter resource for the purposes of linguistic analysis will be one of the technological challenges of the project.