April McMahon
I was born in Edinburgh and grew up in the Scottish Borders, before taking my MA in English Language and Linguistics and then my PhD in English Language at Edinburgh. I spent 12 years teaching in the Department of Linguistics at Cambridge, where I was also a Fellow of Selwyn College, and was then Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield from 2000-04; from 2002-04 I was also Head of the School of English. In January 2005 I returned to Edinburgh as Forbes Professor of English Language. In 2005-06 I was head of the (then new) department of Linguistics and English Language, and since August 2006 I have been Head of the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.
My research has always involved both phonological theory and historical linguistics. At the beginning of my career the emphasis was mainly on phonology, albeit using historical data (as in my 2000 books, Lexical Phonology and the History of English (CUP), and Change, Chance, and Optimality (OUP)); but along the way the balance has shifted and I have become more and more interested in central questions of language change and classification. I have been heavily involved in the development and testing of quantitative methods for language classification and comparison, as in my two AHRC-funded projects 'Quantitative Methods for Language Classification' (2001-04, with Paul Heggarty, Rob McMahon and Natalia Slaska), and 'Sound Comparisons: Language and dialect comparison by phonetic similarity' (2005-07, with Warren Maguire, Paul Heggarty and Dan Dediu). The first of these projects led to Language Classification by Numbers (co-written with Rob McMahon, OUP 2005); the second has continued and developed my long-standing interest in varieties of English, and especially Scots, and Warren Maguire and I are currently co-editing a book, Analysing Variation in English, which is to appear with CUP. You can see the website for this project, with lots of material on accents of English from around the world, at http://www.soundcomparisons.com.
Other recent and ongoing projects are a guest-edited special edition of Transactions of the Philological Society (volume 103.2, 2005, Quantitative Methods for Language Comparison), which showcases the work of a number of research groups developing quantitative approaches to historical linguistic problems; the Handbook of English Linguistics (co-edited with Bas Aarts; Blackwell 2006); and a CUP textbook on Evolutionary Linguistics currently under construction with Rob McMahon. I am increasingly interested in questions of evolutionary linguistics, and Edinburgh is the ideal place for interests of that kind, with the Language Evolution and Computation research unit based in LEL. My next major project is likely to be a study of the evolutionary origins of phonology, developing arguments from some recent articles to the effect that segmental and suprasegmental systems have separate origins, with prosody being significantly older. All these diverse research interests mean I am a member of the research groups in English Language, Language Evolution and Computation, and Language in Context (though I fear being Head of School means I am not such a regular attender as I would like to be), as well as of the reading group in Historical Phonology. In January 2008 I also became one of the editors, along with David Denison at Manchester and Bas Aarts at UCL, of the journal English Language and Linguistics.
While I am Head of School I am mainly focusing on areas other than teaching, though I do continue to make occasional contributions to courses and to give a few research training sessions. In previous years, my teaching has also tended to be in the areas of phonology and historical linguistics, with an increasing emphasis on the latter (though I teach English phonetics and phonology for English Language 1 whenever I get the chance - I’m very partial to first year undergraduate lecturing). I have written two textbooks, Understanding Language Change (CUP, 1994), and An Introduction to English Phonology (EUP, 2001), and am co-editor, with Patrick Honeybone and Joan Beal, of the Edinburgh University Press series Dialects of English. I am very glad to be able to continue working with graduate students, and am currently supervising PhD dissertations on typology; evolutionary linguistics; methods for phonetic comparison; and language shift in the pre-modern period. Past PhD students have worked on topics including syntactic change in Akkadian, the phonology of London English, change explained from the perspective of language as a self-organising system, the history of Trinidadian English Creole, and dialect death in Welsh. I would be delighted to receive applications for PhD or MSc by Research supervision in phonological theory, language change, reconstruction or classification, contact linguistics, or evolutionary linguistics.
Outside the University, I am actively involved with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, as a member of its Council since 2004. I sit on the advisory board for the AHRC Phase 2 Research Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, which started work in January 2006. I was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2003, and of the British Academy in 2005; I chair the Arts and Humanities Research Awards Committee for the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and am a member of the Research Committee of the British Academy. From 2000-2005 I was President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and would heartily recommend membership; and I have also served for two terms as a Council member of the Philological Society, for which I make the same recommendation! I am also a founder member of CLASS, the Committee for Language Awareness in Scottish Schools, which is chaired by my colleague Graeme Trousdale: our aim is to assist teachers in providing materials and curricula for language work in both secondary and primary schools, and to promote further language teaching in schools; ultimately we hope to introduce a Higher in Language. The recent success of the English Language A-Level shows there is a lively interest in language among secondary school students, and I am particularly sorry that Scottish students do not have the opportunity to take a similar language-oriented qualification at pre-University level, especially since there is so much general interest in language in Scotland, where the linguistic situation is also so complex and fascinating. Teachers reading this who are looking for classroom resources might like to browse through the CLASS website (see above), or experiment with the sound files on http://www.soundcomparisons.com.
When I am not writing, or lecturing, or doing administration, I enjoy walking, Scottish country dancing (another good reason for coming home to Scotland), and cooking. So far at least, there’s no deadline so pressing and no administrative angst so serious that a walk on the beach at North Berwick or baking a cake with my children can’t help.
