Benjamin Molineaux
Lecturer
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
Address
- Street
-
Room 1.10, Dugald Stewart Building
- City
- 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
Availability
By appointment
Background
As of April 2021, I am a Lecturer in Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.
Before this post, I held a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship entitled "Digital methods in New-World language change: Words & sounds in older Mapudungun", also here at Edinburgh. That project explored the 400-year textual history of Mapudungun, the ancestral language of the Mapuche people of south-central Chile and Argentina. In order to explore the development of the language's phonology and morphology, I have created (and continue to update) the Corpus of Historical Mapudungun.
I have been a member of the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics since 2014, when I came to Edinburgh to join the FITS Project (From Inglis to Scots: Mapping sounds to spellings). As part of that team, I used spelling variation within the Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots to track the development of the Scots sounds across time and space.
I am generally interested in Historical Phonology and, in particular, prosodic structure and its impact on morphology. I have applied these interests to my work on Mapudungun, Older Scots and Old and Middle English.
Responsibilities & affiliations
The Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics (Depute Director and Secretary)
The English Language Research Group (Convenor)
AMC Catchup Sessions (Convenor)
PPLS Representative for the Centre for Data Culture and Society (CDCS)
Undergraduate teaching
In 2024-2025 I will be involved in the running of the following courses:
- LEL2D: Cross-linguistic Variation: Limits and Theories (Course Organiser – Lectures on Linguistic typology and theory; Phonology and language diversity)
Open to PhD supervision enquiries?
Yes
Areas of interest for supervision
I am keen to supervising graduate/doctoral projects in phonology or historical linguistics, particulary if they have a focus on Scots or the New World.
Current PhD students supervised
Aldo Berríos-Castillo (LEL)
James Engels (LEL)
Ana Fernández Rodríguez (Hispanic Studies)
Claire Graff (LEL)
Brandon Keiffer (LEL)
Pia Lehecka (LEL)
Gillian Marchini (LEL)
Alice Marikan (LEL)
Research summary
Historical phonology, morpho-phonlogy, stress systems, stress perception, Mapudungun (Araucanian), Old and Middle English, Older Scots