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<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>Hello to all DISCOURS list
subscribers! Here are my introductory paragraphs. I hope that
anyone with similar interests will feel free to contact me on this email
address.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>My name is Margaret Sonmez (nee Eden)
and I have been working at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara since
1993. I hold a PhD in Historical Linguistics from Durham University (1993)
and my original degree was in English at Oxford University(graduated
1988). I live and work in Turkey. My husband is Turkish. These two facts
are not unrelated. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>My research background is in
variation and change in the written language, and I am firmly of the belief that
written language is excellent data of its own self - that is, that written
language is a language fully deserving of the attention of serious linguists but
not as a reliable record of the spoken language. I have found very
sensitive patterning of variation in the spellings of relatively private, semi
public and public versions of the same (17th century) text, the analysis of
which formed the bulk of my 1993 PhD Thesis on the standardisation of
English spelling. Research into differences between the empirical facts of
written language and the attitudes that scholars have expressed towards it (in
the case of 17th century spelling) has provided me with evidence of the
distortions due to salience on our own perceptions of linguistic data
(published in "The History of English in a Social Context", de
Gruyter, Trends in Linguistics Series, 2000 - some misprints,
alas!). </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>I was drawn to the DISCOURS list
after a looking at genre and text-type dependent variation of certain discourse
markers in other 17th century materials. This initial interest, presented
in draft form in the Helsinki 2000 ESSE conference and now an article in the
special Genre and Text Type issue of EJES ( European Journal of English
Studies), has grown into a wider concern over the assumptions and methodologies
used in the field sometimes called 'historical pragmatics', a subject I am
currently researching. I am hoping in my next venture to break out from the 17th
century, for all its fascinations, and grapple with these methodological issues
more directly, using contemporary material. My most recent publication,
currently with the printers, is a paper written some while ago on Early
Dictionaries. It is not of much interest to discourse analysts but, for
the record, it will be in the next "Anglia". </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>I think this is probably more than
enough about me! </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>If anyone out there knows of any
sociolinguistic studies on British or US English that uses discourse markers as
data I should be very happy to learn about it. There are so many studies
on phonological/phonetic variables, and so few on the rest!</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT color=#000000 face=Arial size=2>Margaret
Sonmez</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>