Michel Blanc Prize Winner
This year's Michel Blanc Prize for the best MA dissertation was awarded to Glennis Starling.
Congratulations go to Glennis Starling who received the highest mark for her Master's dissertation and was awarded the Michel Blanc prize.
Glennis' response to winning the prize and the abstract for her dissertation is as follows:
"I am hugely grateful to Birkbeck for giving me the opportunity to do research in linguistics, a dream of mine for 30 years. I am also grateful to my husband for all his encouragement, and to my own teenagers for the essential translation work."
Dissertation Abstract
Two of the most common irregular verbs in English, come and do, have a variant past-tense form that is used very frequently in non-standard dialects: ‘When I come to this country I didn’t speak no English.’ ‘After that he always come down the shelter.’ ‘I went in and I done my nut.’ ‘He done weed he done coke he done everything.’ In my MA dissertation I investigated the frequency and distribution of these non-standard forms in the English of London, a variety that is currently undergoing rapid change due to the effects of urbanization, social mobility, immigration, and dialect and language contact. For my data, I used the transcripts from two recent sociolinguistic projects, Multicultural London English and Linguistic Innovators. I carried out a quantitative analysis of the speech samples of teenagers and old-age pensioners, in order to understand the direction of change in the two non-standard verb forms. Do they have a healthy future? Or are they heading into terminal decline? I am hugely grateful to Birkbeck for giving me the opportunity to do research in linguistics, a dream of mine for 30 years. I am also grateful to my husband for all his encouragement, and to my own teenagers for the essential translation work.