Ann Taylor
Emeritus Professor

Profile

Biography

My main research area is variation and change in the history of English with a primary focus on syntax. I have also worked on Ancient Greek (clitics) and the subgrouping of Indo-European. I work within a framework that applies quantitative methodology first developed within variationist sociolinguistics to the structural analysis of historical data, and combines formal syntactic analysis, statistical methods, and techniques of corpus linguistics. 

I am co-creator of three parsed corpora of historical English, the PPCME2, YCOE and PCEEC, and continue to be interested in the creation and exploitation of annotated corpora for linguistic analysis.

Career

• University of Victoria
  BA in Linguistics (1984) 
• University of Pennsylvania
  PhD in Linguistics (1990) 
  Research associate (1990 - 1999) 
• University of York
  Research associate (2000 - 2010) 
  Senior lecturer (2010 - 2019)
  Professor (2019 - ) 

Research

Overview

• History of English
• Language variation and change
• Corpus linguistics 

My current research interests focus primarily on Old English syntax, and include the effects of information structure on the position of objects, the effect on syntax of the translation from Latin and the interaction of syntax and prosody in metrical texts. 

Projects

• The effect of information structure on the position of objects in Old English (with Susan Pintzuk)

Research group(s)

• Language variation and change

Grants

• University of York pump priming fund
  Coding information structure in Old English (2009-10) 

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

• LSA Annual meeting
  Panel session: Towards a linguistically-motivated annotation scheme for information status, Baltimore 2010
  "Investigating information structure in Old English" (with Susan Pintzuk)
• Philological Society Meeting
  Workshop on corpus-based advances in historical linguistics, University of York 2009
  "Verb order, object position, and focus in Old English: a corpus-based study." (with Susan Pintzuk)
• Edinburgh Linguistics Circle
  "Information structure and the syntax of objects in Old English."(with Susan Pintzuk) University of Edinburgh 2009
• University of Tromsø
  Centre for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics, Norway 2008
  "The Effect of Information Structure on Object Position in the History of English." (with Susan Pintzuk)
• University of Tromsø
  "A Quantitative Analysis of the Loss of OV Order in English." (with Susan Pintzuk)
  Department of Language and Linguistics, Norway 2008
• University of Colorado
  "Syntactic variation in Old English: Factors influencing the use of OV vs. VO order." (with Susan Pintzuk)
  NSF Workshop on Unified Linguistic Annotation, Boulder 2008
• Northwestern University
  NSF Workshop on Animacy and Information Structure, Evanston 2008
• Humboldt University
  Workshop on Information Structure and Word Order Variation in older Germanic, Berlin 2007
  "Factors affecting verb-object order in Old and Middle English." (with Susan Pintzuk)