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English Department

Administrative Head - General Manager

Nicole Studer-Joho, Dr.

  • General Manager
Phone
044 634 34 11 (Tue, Thu, Fri)
Room number
PLH-209

After completing my studies in English and German Language and Literature at the University of Zurich, I joined the English Department as assistant to Prof. Schreier in 2006 and instructor in English (historical) linguistics. I successfully defended my PhD thesis in Early Middle English dialectology in 2012. Since then I have moved on to various administrative positions before accepting the position as General Manager of the English Department in 2023. Over the years I have taught numerous courses in English historical linguistics and Old and Middle English and I can be approached for BA and MA thesis in this field.

Publications

Seiler Annina und Nicole Studer-Joho. In Press. Grammatical treatises in early English. In Merja Kytö and Erik Smitterberg, eds. The New Cambridge History of the English Language. Vol. 2. Cambridge: University Press.

Studer, Joho-Nicole. 2014. Diffusion and Change in Early Middle English: Methodological and Theoretical Implications from the LAEME Corpus of Tagged Texts. Schweizerische Anglistische Arbeiten 141. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag.

Jucker, Andreas H., Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler & Nicole Studer-Joho. 2013. Uncovering layers of meaning in the history of the English language. In Andreas H. Jucker, Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler & Nicole Studer-Joho, eds. Meaning in the History of English: Words and Texts in Context. Studies in Language Companion Series 148. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1–15.

Andreas H. Jucker, Daniela Landert, Annina Seiler & Nicole Studer-Joho, eds. 2013. Meaning in the History of English: Words and Texts in Context. Studies in Language Companion Series 148. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Studer-Joho, Nicole. 2012. The Transmission of Alliterative Poetry: Scribal Practice in the A Text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 63: 85-104.

Middle English Grammatical Treatises: The Dialectal Perspective

Thomson's Descriptive Catalogue of Middle English Grammatical Texts (1979) lists 36 Middle English grammatical texts dated from the late 14th to the early 16th century. Although the main purpose of these texts was to teach Latin to pupils, they were all written in the vernacular and the Latin grammars are illustrated and explained through English examples and parallel constructions. Thomson (1984: xvii) mentions that "little independent analysis of English is found in the treatises"; however, he also notes "a number of interesting remarks about the English of the day." Among these are for instance descriptions of both the analytic and synthetic adjective comparison, comments on relative pronouns or discussions of various verbs forms (cf. Thomson 1984: xvii-xxiii).

In this project analyze the late Middle English grammatical texts from a dialectological perspective. I discuss the dialectal data that can be gathered from the texts edited in Thomson (1984) and relate it to the known spatial distribution of these features as presented in LALME. Furthermore, I assess how far the suggested origins of the individual grammars correspond to the text languages as localized in LALME. In those instances, where the manuscripts have not yet been localized, I discuss the possibilities of the mapping tool in eLALME to narrow down possible dialectal origins of the grammars’ text languages.

Completed PhD Project: Diffusion and Change in Early Middle English - Methodological and Theoretical Implications from the LAEME Corpus of Tagged Texts

In my doctoral thesis I examined the diffusion of three linguistic variables in Early Middle English with special focus on the East versus West Midlands. My research is based on data retrieved from the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (2008–), which permits new approaches to Early Middle English dialectology. It includes two morphological and one phonological variable: the reduction from four to three stems of strong verbs, variation between Middle English <a> and <o> and the decline of the dual forms of the personal pronoun. In my thesis I also address methodological problems that are inevitable when studying medieval manuscripts. Furthermore, I discuss how modern diffusion models have to be adapted and redefined for historical data.

 

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