Devyani Sharma
Lecturer in Linguistics
| Department of Linguistics | Office: Hatton House 2A |
| Queen Mary, University of London | Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8338 |
| Mile End Road, London E1 4NS | Fax: +44 (0)20 8980 5400 |
| United Kingdom | Email: initial dot lastname at qmul.ac.uk |
| | Office hours (Jan-March 2010): Mon 4-5, Fri 2-3 |
Research interests
Sociolinguistics, new varieties of English, bilingualism, variation, syntax, typology.
Current research project: Dialect development and style in a diasporic community (ESRC, 2008-2010)
I am completing a book on the emergence of new English dialects out of bilingual continua (Oxford University Press). In another project, I am examining the interaction between individual agency and cognitive constraints in the transmission of dialect features across generations in urban dialect contact situations. I am also interested in internal factors in variation and change, with a focus on syntactic variation in bilingual speech and cross-dialectal comparisons. This interest in variation extends to formal models, in particular (stochastic) Optimality Theory and Lexical Functional Grammar. My empirical focus in this work has been on English dialects, bilingual grammars, and the typology of case and agreement in Indo-Aryan languages.
Curriculum Vitae
Selected work
- 'Typological diversity in New Englishes'
(2009, English World-Wide 30:2)
doi
pdf
- 'AAVE/Creole copula absence: A critique of the imperfect learning hypothesis'
(2009, Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 24:1, with John Rickford)
doi
pdf
- 'Contact-based aspectual restructuring: A critique of the lexical aspect hypothesis'
(2009 under review, with Ashwini Deo)
pdf
- 'Typology in variation: A probabilistic approach to be and n't in the Survey of English Dialects'
(2007, English Language and Linguistics 11:6, with Joan Bresnan and Ashwini Deo)
doi
roa
- 'Typological variation in the ergative morphology of Indo-Aryan languages'
(2006, Linguistic Typology 10:3, with Ashwini Deo)
doi
roa
- 'Dialect stabilization and speaker awareness in non-native varieties of English'
(2005, Journal of Sociolinguistics 9:2)
doi
pdf
- 'Language transfer and discourse universals in Indian English article use'
(2005, Studies in Second Language Acquisition 27:4)
doi
pdf
- 'Discourse clitics and constructive morphology in Hindi'
(2003, in Nominals Inside and Out , eds. M. Butt and T. King)
book
html
- 'The pluperfect in native and non-native English: A comparative corpus study'
(2002, Language Variation and Change 13:3)
doi
pdf
- 'Case marking and person hierarchy effects in Kashmiri'
(2001, in Formal and Empirical Issues in Optimality Theoretic Syntax , ed. P. Sells)
book
- Gendered Practices in Language (co-edited, 2001)
book
(please email me if you'd like a copy of a paper)
Teaching
| (Current) | (Other) |
| History of English | Sociolinguistics |
| Research Methods in Linguistics | World Englishes |
| Bilingualism | Dialects of English |
| Contact and Change |
| Language and Gender |