PD Dr. Marion Schulte

Research interests
Sociophonetics
Morphology
Lexical semantics
Language change

Current research topics
I am currently working on a project that investigates the connection between language and identity in Dublin English. Correlates between language production, especially consonant and vowel realisations, and identity construction can be found in the speech of young South Dubliners. The basis for this project are ethnographic observations and interviews.

My doctoral dissertation was concerned with the semantics of derivational morphology. I investigated the semantic structure of two English suffixes, -age and –ery, in Middle English and Present Day English. To do this, I used a semantic map approach, which I have adapted to account for the semantics of derivational affixes. These semantic maps provide a good means of comparing the change in the semantics of –age and –ery that can be observed in both dictionary and corpus data, but they can also be used to compare different derivational affixes in the same language and morphological categories across different languages.