Pia Pratscher Lehecka
Thesis title: Long vowels and diphthongs in Older Scots
Linguistics and English Language
Year of study: 3
- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Email: plehecka@ed.ac.uk
PhD supervisors:
Address
- Street
-
Dugald Stewart Building
- City
- 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
- Post code
- EH8 9AD
Background
I am a historical linguist researching the development of long vowels and diphthongs in Older Scots. Most of my work falls into corpus linguistics - both research and compilation.
I'm particularly interested in all aspects of spelling and its connection to sound, which includes graphemic and dialectal variation. Recent work has taken a turn towards graphotactics as well, specifically the minim effect and how it alters our understanding and application of the littera method.
Methodologically, I'm a defender of mixed methods approaches and incorporate both qualitative and statistical analyses in my research.
I've been/am part of the following research projects:
- From Inglis to Scots (University of Edinburgh, 2023-5)
- reconstruction of Older Scots sounds based on spelling variation, corpus compilation
- Harnessing AI to digitise medieval Scots laws (University of Glasgow, 2024-5)
- transcription of handwritten Older Scots legal texts using Transkribus, corpus compilation
- Dialects of Scots (University of Aberdeen, 2025)
- fieldwork recruiting and recording Modern Scots speakers
CV
150353.pdf
Qualifications
MA English Language and Linguistics 2023 (University of Vienna)
- Thesis: The role of subjectivity in the grammaticalisation of downtoners
BA English and American Studies 2020 (University of Vienna)
- Thesis: Robert Burns’s Scots Songs on the Jacobite Movement
Responsibilities & affiliations
Committee member organising the following events:
- 7th Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology
- The Sixth Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology
Undergraduate teaching
Tutoring:
- Linguistic Theory and the Structure of English
- English in Time and Space
- Quantitative Methods in Linguistics
- Historical Linguistics
- History of English
Postgraduate teaching
Lecturing:
- English in Time and Space
- Scots and Scottish English
- Historical Phonology
- Historical Linguistics