Dr Katerina Somers
Lecturer in German Linguistics with Medieval German

Location: Arts One 2.04
email: k.somers@qmul.ac.uk
Phone: (+44) 020-7882-5741
Fax: (+44) 020-8980-5400


Office hours:

Mondays: 2pm-3pm
Thursday 4pm-5pm

Research Interests:

  • The historical Germanic dialects: Old High German, Old Saxon, Old English, Middle High German, Middle Dutch
  • Historical linguistics—syntactic, morphosyntactic and phonological change
  • Theories of language change
  • Sociohistorical linguistics
  • The syntax of Modern German
  • Philology—the interaction of metre and syntax

Teaching

I am teaching the following modules:

  • German I (Translation into English)
  • German I N (Grammar)
  • History of the German Language
  • Foreign Influences and Linguistic Purism in the History of German

Publications:

Monograph:

2009. From phonology to syntax: pronominal cliticization in Otfrid’s Evangelienbuch.  Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. ISBN 978-3-484-30530-4.

Articles & Book Reviews:

2011. Disambiguating clausal status in the Old Saxon Hêliand (with Shannon Dubenion-Smith, in preparation).

2011. The introduction and extension of the –st ending in Old High German (in press). Journal of Germanic Linguistics. 

2008. Morphosyntactic Change.  Functional and Formal Perspectives (review of Fischer, O.).  Journal of Germanic Linguistics 20.4.  29-38. 

2008. The Germanic Languages (review of Harbert, W.).  Journal of Germanic Linguistics. 20.1. 81-86.

2007. A Phonetic Account of Anglian Smoothing (with Robert B. Howell).  Folia Linguistica Historica. 28.1. 187-214.