Professor Joanna Kopaczyk
- Professor of Scots and English Philology (English Language & Linguistics)
telephone:
01413307586
email:
Joanna.Kopaczyk@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns:
She/her/hers
Room 307, 12 University Gardens, English Language & Linguistics, Glasgow G12 8QH
Research interests
I'm a historical linguist with a special interest in the medieval and early modern history of the Scots language. I am also interested in the historiography of minority languages and how it affects their modern perceptions. This is especially important in the context of Scots. I have been involved in language advocacy and policy development for Scots, drawing on my recent project, The Future of Scots (funded by the RSE, 2020-2023).
I use corpus-driven methods to uncover textual standardisation and I'm also interested in formulaicity in language, as revealed through all kinds of repetitive patterns. I have co-edited books on Applications of Pattern-Driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics (John Benjamins, 2018) and on Binomials in the History of English (Cambridge University Press, 2017), such as to grant and to give, law and order, back and forth, which are prime examples of formulaicity and repetition.
I find it fascinating to explore legal texts composed in medieval Scottish burghs, since this is where the Scots language came to the fore as an official and formal means of communication. I have studied this evolving vernacular legal discourse in The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs (Oxford University Press, 2013) and introduced the communities of practice framework to historical linguistic studies (Communities of Practice in the History of English, co-ed. with Andreas H. Jucker, John Benjamins, 2013). More recently, I was part of the FITS team at the University of Edinburgh (From Inglis to Scots: Mapping sounds to spellings) and worked on reconstructing the relationships between the proliferation of spelling variants and their postulated sound values in pre-1500 legal and administrative Scots texts. In our publications (Kopaczyk et al. 2018, Maguire et al. 2019, Molineaux et al. 2023), we have introduced corpus methods to the study of historical phonology and rewritten the histories of several sound changes postulated for Scots. We have also co-edited a volume of cutting-edge research on Historical dialectology in the digital age (Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
I'm increasingly drawn towards Early Modern Scots and I'd like to develop a systematic approach for tracing the demise of Scots under pressure from English in the official registers. I'm planning to look more closely at these two standardising languages in competition, as I'm also interested in historical multilingualism and why different languages were selected for different communicative purposes. I have collaborated on a project tracing Old Polish in medieval Latin land court books (eROThA). This brings us again to formulaic language, conventions, genre expectations, which - in turn - evoke various pragmatic strands of inquiry, such as (im)politeness and contextual language choices. I'm also fascinated with the early modern Scottish diaspora abroad, especially in the Baltic and Central Europe.
Publications
Selected publications
Kopaczyk, J. (2023) The challenges of bringing together multilingualism and multimodality: unpacking the structural model of multilingual practice. In: Włodarczyk, M., Tyrkkö, J., Tyrkkö, J. and Adamczyk, E. (eds.) Multilingualism from Manuscript to 3D: Intersections of Modalities from Medieval to Modern Times. Routledge: London, pp. 119-138. ISBN 9780367763596 (doi: 10.4324/9781003166634-7)
Molineaux, B., Kopaczyk, J. , Alcorn, R., Maguire, W., Karaiskos, V. and Los, B. (2021) Phonotactics, graphotactics and contrast: the history of Scots dental fricative spellings. English Language and Linguistics, 25(1), pp. 91-119. (doi: 10.1017/S1360674319000479)
Kopaczyk, J. (2020) The language of medieval legal record as a complex multilingual code. In: Armstrong, J. W. and Frankot, E. (eds.) Cultures of Law in Urban Northern Europe. Scotland and its Neighbours c. 1350-c.1650. Series: Theses in medieval and early modern history. Routledge: London, pp. 58-79. ISBN 9780367206802 (doi: 10.4324/9780429262869-6)
Kopaczyk, J. (2020) Textual standardisation of legal Scots vis a vis Latin. In: Wright, L. (ed.) The Multilingual Origins of Standard English. Series: Topics in English Linguistics [TiEL] (107). De Gruyter Mouton: Berlin, pp. 487-514. ISBN 9783110687514 (doi: 10.1515/9783110687545-018)
Kopaczyk, J. , Molineaux Ress, B., Karaiskos, V., Alcorn, R., Los, B. and Maguire, W. (2018) Towards a grapho-phonologically parsed corpus of medieval Scots: Database design and technical solutions. Corpora, 13(2), pp. 255-269. (doi: 10.3366/cor.2018.0146)
Tyrkkö, J. and Kopaczyk, J. (2018) Present applications and future directions in pattern-driven approaches to corpus linguistics. In: Kopaczyk, J. and Tyrkkö, J. (eds.) Applications of Pattern-driven Methods in Corpus Linguistics. Series: Studies in corpus linguistics (82). John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam ; Philadelphia, pp. 1-12. ISBN 9789027200136 (doi: 10.1075/scl.82.01tyr)
Kopaczyk, J. and Sauer, H. (2017) Defining and exploring binomials. In: Kopaczyk, J. and Sauer, H. (eds.) Binomials in the History of English: Fixed and Flexible. Series: Studies in English language. Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-24. ISBN 9781107118478
Jucker, A. H. and Kopaczyk, J. (2017) Historical (im)politeness. In: Culpeper, J., Haugh, M. and Kádár, D. Z. (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness. Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 433-459. ISBN 9781137375070 (doi: 10.1057/978-1-137-37508-7_17)
Kopaczyk, J. , Włodarczyk, M. and Adamczyk, E. (2016) Medieval multilingualism in Poland: creating a corpus of Greater Poland court oaths (ROThA). Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 51(3), (doi: 10.1515/stap-2016-0012)
Kopaczyk, J. (2013) The Legal Language of Scottish Burghs: Standardization and Lexical Bundles (1380-1560). Series: Oxford studies in language and law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199945153 (doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199945153.001.0001)
All publications
Grants
- Principal Investigator: Language policy and planning for Scots: A community-driven approach (The Future of Scots), The Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts & Humanities Research Grant, c. £10,000
- Post-doctoral Research Assistant (2014-17) / Co-Investigator (2017-18): From Inglis to Scots: Mapping Sounds to Spellings ('FITS'), University of Edinburgh, UK (AHRC grant, AH/L004542/1, Principal Investigator: Prof. Bettelou Los, Co-Investigators: Dr Rhona Alcorn, Dr Warren Maguire), c. £1,000,000
- Principal Investigator (2015)/Co-Investigator (2015-18): Multilingualism in the Electronic Repository of Greater Polish Court Oaths (ROThA), National Science Centre, Poland (nr 2014/13/B/HS2/00644, Principal Investigator: Dr Matylda Włodarczyk, Co-Investigator: Dr Elżbieta Adamczyk), c.£62,500
- Principal Investigator in post-doctoral individual project grant (2009-12, nr N N104 014337): Repetitive constructions in standardising specialised discourse: A diachronic analysis of administrative and legal Scots texts, Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Poland, c. £14,000
Supervision
- Beattie, Beth
Controversial Beliefs in 16th-century Scotland and England - Campbell, Molly
Pronouncing Early Modern English and Scots: Reassessing the evidence for ‘non-standard’ speech in Early Modern Britain. - Coeyman, Louis
Scots language revitalisation in the 21st century - Elder, Claire
An Early Modern Scottish Community of Practice: A socio-cultural analysis of formulaic features in the Stewart and Erskine family correspondence, including the letters of Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar.
I'm happy to supervise students in the following fields:
- Scots language from a historical perspective
- Historical multilingualism and multimodality
- Formulaic language
- Linguistic transgression, including impoliteness
Your thesis can be based on both corpora and manuscripts / original prints. Your research questions may relate to spelling, phonology, formulaic language, pragmatics and specialised discourse. Qualitative approaches and comparative perspectives - especially in relation to English - are also welcome.
Current supervisees:
The Cloud Factory: A memoir, accompanied by an exploration of traumatic lived experience in working-class contemporary Scottish literature.
Controversial Beliefs in 16th-century Scotland and England
Older Scots Poetry in Romance Translations
Pronouncing Early Modern English and Scots: Reassessing the evidence for ‘non-standard’ speech in Early Modern Britain
Scots language revitalisation in the 21st century
Recovering Early Modern Scottish Voices: A socio-cultural analysis of the language of the Stewart and Erskine family correspondence, including the letters of Marie Stewart, Countess of Mar
Past supervisees:
- Selfe, David
An Apostrophe to Scots: The invention and diffusion of the Scots apostrophe in eighteenth-century Scottish verse
Teaching
Pre-Honours (2023-24)
Historical Scots strand in English Language & Linguistics 1B: Language, Society and Change (ENGLANG1003)
Honours (2023-24)
I lecture on the following courses:
Bad Language: From Taboo to Prescriptivism (ENGLANG4067)
History of Scots (ENGLANG4038), and its postgraduate extension Introduction to Older Scots (ENGLANG5098), Semester 2
Additional information
Chair of the Forum for Research on Languages of Scotland and Ulster
Academic Officer of Oor Vyce, the campaign for a legal recognition of Scots
Deputy Lead for Linguistics+ Catalyst (SGSAH)
Former Head of English Language & Linguistics (2019-2022) and Deputy Head of School of Critical Studies (2021-2022)