Department of English

Academic Staff

Research Interests

Sociolinguistics; language variation and change (esp. in urban multicultural contexts); multiethnolects; language and dialect contact; the impact of immigration on dialect change; the language of adolescents from a variationist perspective.

Teaching

Recent Courses

 

Autumn 2015:

Global English

Intra-speaker variation

London English

 

Spring 2015:

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change

The Social Psychological Study of Language Attitudes

 

Other courses taught:

Sociolinguistics

Varieties of English

Second Language Learning Experience

English Language Teaching and its Contexts

Second Language Acquisition and English Language Teaching

The Discourse of Language Classrooms

Research Methods

Publications

Books

2015 (fc) Fox, S. The New Cockney: New Ethnicities and Adolescent Speech in the Traditional
East End of London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Journal Articles

2014     Levon, E. and Fox, S. Social Salience and the Sociolinguistic Monitor: a Case Study of ING and TH-fronting in Britain. Journal of English Linguistics (Online First).

2013     Cheshire, J., Adger, D. and Fox, S. Relative who and the actuation problem.
Lingua 126: 51-77.

2011     Cheshire, J., Kerswill, P., Fox, S. and Torgersen, E. Contact, the feature pool and the speech community: The emergence of Multicultural  London English.  Journal of Sociolinguistics 15(2): 1-46.

2011     Torgersen, E., Gabrielatos, C., Hoffmann, S. and Fox, S. A corpus-based study of pragmatic markers in London English. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. Special issue: Corpus Linguistics and Sociolinguistic Inquiry 7:1, 93-118.

2010     Gabrielatos, C., Torgersen, E., Hoffmann, S. and Fox, S. Corpus-Based Sociolinguistic Study of Indefinite Article Forms in London English. Journal Of English Linguistics 38: 297-334.

2009    Cheshire, J. and Fox, S. New perspectives on was/were variation in London. Language Variation and Change. 21:1, 1-38.

2008    Cheshire, J., Fox, S., Kerswill, P. and Torgersen, E. Ethnicity, friendship network and social practices as the motor of dialect change: Linguistic innovation in London. Sociolinguistica 22, 1-23.

2008 Kerswill, P., Torgersen, E. and Fox, S. Reversing “drift”: Innovation and diffusion in the London diphthong system. Language Variation and Change 20:3, 451-91.

Book chapters

2012      Fox, S. Cockney. In Alexander Bergs and Laurel Brinton (eds). English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

2012      Fox, S. Performed narrative: the pragmatic function of this is + speaker and other quotatives in London adolescent speech. In Ingrid van Alphen and Isabelle Buchstaller (eds). Quotatives: Cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

2012     Fox. S. Spoken language. In Language: A Student Handbook on Key Topics and Theories. Edited by Dan Clayton and English and Media Centre. London: English and Media Centre.

2011     Fox, S., Khan, A. and Torgersen, E. The emergence and diffusion of Multicultural English in London and Birmingham. In Friederike Kern and Margret Setling (eds.). Pan-ethnic styles of speaking in European Metropolitan Cities. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

2010     Fox, S. Ethnicity Religion and Practices: Adolescents in the East End of London. In Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds). Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 144-56.

2009    Britain, D. and Fox, S. The Regularisation of the Hiatus Resolution System in British English: A Contact-Induced 'Vernacular Universal'? In M. Filppulu, J.Klemola and H. Paulasto (eds). Vernacular Universals vs. Contact-Induced Change. Routledge: London. 177-206.

2006 Torgersen, E., Kerswill, P. and Fox, S. Ethnicity as a source of changes in the London vowel system. In F. Hinskens (ed.). Language Variation - European Perspectives. Selected Papers from the Third International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE3), Amsterdam, June 2005. Amsterdam, Benjamins. 249-63.

Research

Research interests:

Sociolinguistics; language variation and change (esp. in urban multicultural contexts); multiethnolects; language and dialect contact; the impact of immigration on dialect change; the language of adolescents from a variationist perspective.

Projects:

'From Sociolinguistic Research to English Language Teaching'. UK Economic and Social Research Council funded, with co-researchers Jenny Cheshire and Paul Kerswill. This project aimed to disseminate knowledge gained from the Linguistic Innovators and Multicultural London English projects to teachers and students of (UK) A-Level English Language. The project culminated in a website of resources for English teachers and students http://sllf.qmul.ac.uk/englishlanguageteaching consisting of a databank of sound files, transcriptions and language investigations and the launch of the Linguistics Research Digest http://linguistics-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/

'Multicultural London English: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety'. UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded, with researchers Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire, Eivind Torgersen and Arfaan Khan. The project examines the role of ethnic minority English in driving forward linguistic innovation in the capital on the levels of phonetics, grammar and discourse features. The key to this is to understand the nature of what we call 'Multicultural London English' (MLE), the (supposedly) ethnically neutral way of speaking which still contains many 'ethnic' features.

'Linguistic Innovators: the English of Adolescents in London'. UK Economic and Social Research Council-funded, with researchers Paul Kerswill, Jenny Cheshire and Eivind Torgersen. This project is a systematic sociolinguistic study, taking into account (1) London’s massive multilingualism; (2) linguistic innovation in adolescence; (3) the effect of a ‘multiracial vernacular’ among young Londoners on mainstream speech; (4) differences in ethnic makeup, mobility and networks between inner and outer London, resulting in differences in capacity to innovate and spread linguistic features. Around 70 16-19 year olds in two boroughs are sampled and their speech analysed, using quantitative and qualitative methods to find explanations for their speech patterns. The project seek the origins of linguistic change in London’s complex social mix, thus gaining a critical understanding of levelling in Britain.