Prof David Denison - personal details

Role: Smith Professor of English Language & Medieval Literature

Email: hNQSh?h.xS`7xFVNxO@.`$.-?NO?DZ75=QPJGXhy*En+8A}BUYe9^~K|S4muLRc{jrMq@sHzxtlawkb'.2o13v0%VDdfO#g-IpF`CT!$/N_ZiW?6

Websites

• School of Arts, Languages and Cultures
• ARCHER
• Corpus of late 18C Prose
• Corpus of late ModE Prose
• Papers for download

Education, employment

After an undergraduate degree at Cambridge (Mathematics, then Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic) I did a doctorate at Oxford. I have been at Manchester for a long time, with a personal chair since 1995, and the Smith chair from 2008.

Visiting Positions

• 2011-12 PhD Program in Linguistics in the University of Zurich (Kurzzeitdozent)
• 2006 Institut du Monde anglophone, Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle (Visiting Professor, and associate member of Groupe de Recherches en Linguistique Anglaise SESYLIA).
• 1998 Dpto. Filoloxía Inglesa e Alemana, University of Santiago de Compostela (Visiting Professor).
• 1992 Department of English, University of British Columbia (Visiting Professor).
• 1985-86 Engels Seminarium, University of Amsterdam (Gastdocent).

 

Editorial work.  I have been heavily involved in editing, particularly of the journal English Language and Linguistics.  We founded ELL with the hope that it would become the journal of choice for the community of scholars in the field of English historical linguistics, and would actually help to form a scholarly community among those working on present-day English.

• 1995-2010 Founding editor (with Bas Aarts and †Richard Hogg) of English Language and Linguistics.
• 2012 Editor (with Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero, Chris McCully & Emma Moore) of Analysing Older English, a collection of essays for the late Professor Richard Hogg. 
• 1996-2004 General editor (with †R. H. Robins and Geoffrey Horrocks) of Longman Linguistics Library.
• 1997 Guest editor (with Nigel Vincent) of a special issue of Transactions of the Philological Society.

• I was one of a three-man team from the LAGB who advised the then Department for Education and Employment on materials for the literacy strategy in primary schools, notably the enhanced glossary. I retain an interest in the teaching of English language at school level.
• Computing work has included helping with the multi-lingual Vuwriter Arts word processor in the 1980s; my own numbering program NUM in the 1990s; the acquisition of texts and corpora and the use of concordance programs (see Computer Resources for linguists, due for updating); and building a "temporary" (1999-2005!) and increasingly versatile student record database for department and School.
• I chaired the organising committee of the 10th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (10ICEHL, 1998) and Directions in English Language Studies (DELS, April 2006).
• I was President of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) 2008-11 and remain on its exceutive committee.

Many of my papers are available from this page, wherever possible from eScholar (the Institutional Repository).

Non-academic link: Saddleworth Beer Walk.