Michael Ramsammy
Lecturer

- Linguistics and English Language
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences
Contact details
- Tel: 0131 650 3959
- Email: m.ramsammy@ed.ac.uk
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:
- 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
- Matt King
- Siqing Li
- Vittoria Moresco
- George Sakr
- Lourdes Barquín Sanmartín
- Gilly Marchini
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
Research activities
- PPLS Roundtable on Decolonising the Curriculum (Black History Month 2022)
- Opacidade, resilabificação e alofonia das consoantes róticas do português | Opacity, resyllabification and Portuguese rhotic allophony
- Phonological variation in post-colonial varieties of Spanish: an overview of experimental research
- On /l/-insertion in Hindi causative verbs to
- Towards an analysis of of vowel alternations and epenthesis in Hindi causative verbs
- Sound change and rhythm in Altiplateau Mexican Spanish
- An ultrasound study of mid-vowel neutralisation in Portuguese: the effects of stress, nasality and variable nasalisation
-
On the diachrony of lateral epethesis
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Accepted/In press) -
Vowel compression in Altiplateau Mexican Spanish
In:
Isogloss, vol. 8, pp. 1-27
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5565/rev/isogloss.171
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Dialect-specific acoustic correlates of stress in Spanish: The role of vowel compression and syllable structure
In:
Working papers in linguistics., vol. 28
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Contextual reduction of word-final /l/ in Spanish: An EPG study
In:
Journal of the International Phonetic Association, pp. 1-28
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0025100321000128
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
I see what you did there: The role of iconicity in the acquisition of signs
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12775/3991-1.120
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Conference contribution (Published) -
The phonology-phonetics interface in constraint-based grammar: Gradience, variability and phonological change
(32 pages)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315675428
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Preface: Papers in Historical Phonology
In:
Papers in Historical Phonology, vol. 1, pp. 1-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/pihph.1.2016.1689
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Editorial (Published) -
From phonetic enhancement to phonological underspecification: Hybrid voicing contrast in European Portuguese
In:
Papers in Historical Phonology, vol. 1, pp. 285-315
DOI: https://doi.org/10.2218/pihph.1.2016.1704
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published) -
Micro-variation in information structure: There sentences in Italo-Romance
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110368758
Research output: › Chapter (peer-reviewed) (Published) -
Preaspiration in North Argyll Gaelic and its contribution to prosodic structure
Research output: Contribution to Conference › Paper (Published)