Michael Ramsammy

Reader

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

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 3.03, Dugald Stewart Building

City
3 Charles Street, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9AD

Availability

  • Office hours:
    My office is 3.03 in Dugald Stewart Building. I don't have set weekly office hours. Please email m.ramsammy@ed.ac.uk to arrange an appointment.

Undergraduate teaching

Teaching:

  • LASC10093 Sign Language Linguistics
  • LASC10089 Current Issues in Phonology
  • LASC10083 Phonological Theory and English Phonology
  • LASC10046 Historical Phonology
  • LASC10102 Language Variation and Change
  • LASC08022 Linguistics and English Language 1A (LEL1A)
  • LASC08023 Linguistics and English Language 1B (LEL1B)

Postgraduate teaching

  • LASC11089 Introduction to Phonology (MSc)
  • LASC11165 Guided Research in LEL: Sign Language Phonology

 

I'm also the programme director for the MSc in Linguistics (see here: http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees/index.php?r=site/view&id=908).  Please get in touch if you have any enquiries about this programme.

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I'm happy to supervise PhD and MSc projects that align in some way with my research interests.  Below is a list of titles of some dissertations and theses that I've supervised in recent years.  Potential students should feel free to contact me directly to discuss research supervision with me.

 

Recent dissertation/thesis titles:

  • Plurilingualism, intercomprehension and positive transfer: acquisition of mood and aspect in L2 and L3 Spanish
  • Morphological variation in Bangla: exploring patterns of gender and age-based variation in child-directed speech
  • Pseudo-gemination and external sandhi in Modern Standard Hindi
  • Unnatural consonant epenthesis doesn't exist
  • The social meaning of /r/ in Austrian German
  • Vowel qualities and language attitudes of Derby adolescents: a study of PRICE, TRAP/BATH and FOOT/STRUT
  • The Realness: style-shifting in drag performance
  • The acquisition of /l/-darkening by Spanish-English bilinguals
  • The effect of iconicity on L2 acquisition of British Sign Language
  • I see what you did there. Iconicity aids the acquisition of signs in the gestural modality.
  • To what extent does Kazakh have rounding harmony?

 

Current PhD students supervised

Research summary

I have a broad range of interests in Linguistics.  These include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Experimental and theoretical phonology
  • Articulatory and acoustic phonetics
  • Historical phonology and sound change
  • Sign language linguistics, with a focus on BSL
  • Romance Linguistics, with a focus on Portuguese and Spanish
  • South Asian languages
  • Caribbean Creole Englishes, especially Guyanese Creole English
  • Sociophonetics and language variation