Introduction

[Margaret Sonmez]

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.

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.  

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!).   

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". 

I think this is probably more than enough about me! 

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!

Margaret Sonmez
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