Jim Donaldson

Thesis title: Control in free adjuncts: The "dangling modifier" in English

Linguistics and English Language

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

Contact details

PhD supervisors:

Address

Street

LG38

City
7 George Square
Post code
EH8 9JZ

Availability

  • Pandemic hours

    Mo 18:30--22:00
    Tu 12:00--13:00
    We 18:30--22:00
    Th 16:00--21:00
    Fr 9:30--12:00, 15:00--19:30
    Sa 13:30--19:30
    Su 9:30--15:30, 17:30--21:00
    (I'm also often on late in the evening (22:00-23:00))

Biography

Background

My MSc dissertation (2013) was on the interpretation of elliptical why questions ("Why do that?", "Why him?").  It received the 2013 award for Best PPLS Dissertation.

My PhD dissertation (2020) was on free adjuncts with atypical control ("dangling modifiers") in English.

I was a research assistant for PLAEME (A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English).  My job was to correct the parsing for approximately 200,000 words of Early Middle English spread across 40 texts.

I am also the coordinator for the PPLS Skills Centre.

Teaching

I have taught several courses at the Centre for Open Learning: Linguistics (2 sections), History of English, Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics and Introduction to English Grammar. 

I received EUSA Teaching Award nominations for "Best overall teacher" in 2016 and "Innovative assessment" for Linguistics: the Science of Language in 2017.

Outreach

I've been working on animated linguistics videos with a number of professors (Caroline Heycock and Geoff Pullum, with more on the way).  These videos were created with the help of the Teaching and Learning Initiative Fund and have been posted to the PPLS LEL YouTube channel. 

I'm also the video manager for the UK Linguistics Olympiad.  With the help of the Innovative Initiative Grant, I am currently collaborating with Graeme Trousdale on a series of videos designed to help students prepare for the competition.

Research summary

ellipsis, anaphora, pragmatics, control, LFG

Donaldson, J. (2020). Control in Free Adjuncts: The "Dangling Modifier" in English: University of Edinburgh dissertation.

Gisborne, N., & Donaldson, J. (2019). Thematic Roles and Events. In R. Truswell (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Event Structure.

Truswell, R., Alcorn, R., Donaldson, J., & Wallenberg, J. (2017). A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English. In R. Alcorn, J. Kopaczyk, B. Los & B. Molineaux (Eds.) Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age

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