Benjamin J. Molineaux

I am currently a post-doc at the the University of Edinburgh's Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics.  I am involved in a large corpus-study of the relation between sound and spellings in Older Scots entitled From Inglis to Scots: Mapping Sounds to Spellings (FITS, for short). 

As a DPhil Student at the Language and Brain Lab, I worked on the interaction of morphological and prosodic structure. In particular, I was interested in how the requirements of different morphological types influence the role of stress in a language. One of the key related questions is whether synchronic and diachronic processes can be said to prioritise the morphology over the prosody or, conversely, the prosody over the morphology.

My focus was on Mapudungun (aka Araucanian), a polysynthetic agglutinating language of south-central Chile and Argentina, as well as on Early English, a more markedly synthetic and fusional language than its present day form.

In terms of research methods, I worked with original fieldwork and acoustical data (Mapudungun stress), experimental data (L2 stress perception), and corpus/textual evidence (stress in older Mapudungun, and in Old and Middle English).

My supervisor was Prof Aditi Lahiri

Whilst working as a graduate Research Assistant in the Language and Brain Laboratory, I helped with experimental work and phonetic analysis.  I was also involved in a production study examining ‘fake’ geminate consonants across word, compound, and affix boundaries in English and German.