Linguistic editorial work

I was for many years an editor of English Language and Linguistics, which has become one of the leading journals in its field. It subsequently entered into a close relationship with the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE).

• 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, contributing to the LAGB's recommendations for grammatical terminology to be used in schools.
• 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 for the department and the use of concordance programs; building a "temporary" (1999-2005!) and increasingly versatile student record database for department and School; and constructing and processing TEI/XML files as part of an online edition. 

• Corpus and textual editing work.  I ran a project to apply morphological tagging to a collection of Middle English sermons, and in connection with the CHEL research created a nineteenth-century Corpus of late Modern English Prose (1994), with Graeme Trousdale and Linda van Bergen as assistants.  A Corpus of late 18c Prose (letters in the John Rylands University Library) was transcribed by Linda van Bergen and Joana Proud and recently re-published on the web. In a plenary lecture in 2005 I explored the rich hoard of non-standard syntax in the letters and the question of what "change from below" signifies. Two plenary papers on tagging problems have been published (2007 and 2013).
  Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and I belong to the international consortium overseeing the third phase of ARCHER, a multi-genre historical corpus of British and American English from the 17th century to the present, giving access to it in Manchester. We coordinate the current phase of the project, for which I won a British Academy Small Research Grant. This phase has nearly doubled ARCHER's size and made it available online for researchers, who continue to seek access and use it, but further development of the corpus is in abeyance.
  We used a seedcorn grant from the John Rylands Research Institute to work towards an online edition of the papers of Mary Hamilton, a corpus project running since 2013-14 with major student involvement from several universities called Image to Text: Mary Hamilton papers. A multidisciplinary team I assembled – Hannah Barker (managing the project), Sophie Coulombeau,  Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and myself – won a substantial AHRC grant for Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers, a three-year project (extended by one year because of the pandemic) to complete the edition and conduct wide-ranging literary and linguistic research. We started in December 2019, joined by the postdocs Tino Oudesluijs, Christine Wallis and Cassandra Ulph. Tino is working with me on the history of auxiliaries. We have produced an innovative methodology for constructing social network mappings of reasonable size from marked-up TEI documents. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza and I continue to work both on correcting and extending the online edition and on research publications associated with the project, including a special issue of Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies. 
• Construction Grammar. I have experimented with Construction Grammar theories in ongoing work on sort of/kind of constructions and in a paper on taking long. An earlier attempt avant la lettre was embodied in papers on what I call the Information Present.
• Literary networks. An explanation for the origins of the progressive passive which involves social network theory and English literary politics ca 1800 was published in a joint paper with Lynda Pratt.