PhD student research interests
Anita Auer
Working title for PhD thesis
Language standardisation and prescription in the eighteenth century: the subjunctive in English and (Austrian) German.
Supervisors: Professor Sylvia Adamson and Professor Martin Durrell.
Research
My current research focuses on the diachronic development of the subjunctive mood in English and German. In my dissertation I am particularly concerned with the socio-cultural aspects of variation and change in the use of the subjunctive mood in the eighteenth century, i.e. the main period in which standardisation took place in England and Austria. In my work I do not only focus on actual language use but also on what 'prescriptive' grammarians had to say about the mood and on the extent to which they influenced the development of the subjunctive in English and Austrian German.
My Mag.Phil. thesis for the University of Vienna was on 'Morphophonemic Alternations in Old English'.
My research interests can be summarised as language change, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics, dialectology, and standardisation.
Papers
28 September 2002: 'Samuel Johnson and his use of the subjunctive mood', Triangle Colloquium, University of Leeds.
31 August 2003: 'Grammatical prescription in English and German in the 18th century - a study of the 'subjunctive' and the 'Konjunktiv'', Henry Sweet Society Colloquium, Trinity College Dublin.
13 September 2003: 'Recognising language change - a corpus study of the subjunctive mood in early and late Modern English', 4th UK Language Variation and Change Conference, University of Sheffield.
27 September 2003: 'The subjunctive mood in early and late Modern English - a corpus study', Triangle Colloquium, University of Sheffield.
7 April 2004: 'Why is Austrian German so
würde-voll?', Conference of University Teachers of German in Great Britain and Ireland (CUTG), University of Liverpool.
August 2004: 'Prescription and usage in the 18th century: a methodological advance?'. Paper to be presented at the 13th International Conference of English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL), University of Vienna, Austria.
Teaching
I am employed by the University of Manchester as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in German and I am responsible for the Languagewise German Intermediate Course. I have also contributed to teaching undergraduate courses on German sociolinguistics and German-English translation. I have also given IT sessions for visiting school pupils.
During my teacher training in Austria I was employed in two secondary schools as a teacher of English and Psychology. The teaching of English included literature as well as grammar.
Background
Mag. Phil. in English and American Studies, and Psychology, Philosophy, Pedagogy (University of Vienna, Austria)
PGCE-equivalent (Unterrichtspraktikum) (Vienna, Austria)
My e-mail address is a.auer@stud.man.ac.uk