Benjamin Molineaux

Lecturer

Linguistics and English Language
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Tel: 0131 650 6977
Email: Benjamin.Molineaux@ed.ac.uk
Web: http://www.homepages.ed.ac.uk/bmolinea/

Street: Room 1.10, Dugald Stewart Building
City: 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9AD

By appointment

Biography

Background

As of April 2021, I am a Lecturer in Linguistics in our department.

I recently finished a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship entitled "Digital methods in New-World language change: Words & sounds in older Mapudungun", which explores 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 (Secretary)

The English Language Research Group (Convenor)

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

In 2021-2022 I will be involved in the running of the following courses:

LEL1A (Language puzzles component throughout the course; Introduction to phonetics)
LEL2D: Cross-linguistic Variation: Limits and Theories (Linguistic typology and theory; Phonology and language diversity)

Postgraduate teaching

In 2021-2022 I will be involved in the running of the following courses:

Scots and Scottish English (Hons./MSc)
Phonological Theory (Hons./MSc – Course Organiser)

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.