School of English, University of Leeds | staff pages
Clive Upton
Professor of Modern
English Language
email: c.s.upton@leeds.ac.uk
tel: +44(0) 113 343 4740
fax: +44(0) 113 343 4774
room: 5.G.02
Professor Clive Upton BA, MA, Wales; PhD, Leeds; FHEA
For a list of publications since 2001 click here
For a full list of publications click here
Interests in modern English Language; diachronic and synchronic dialectology; sociolinguistics; history of English; phonetics and phonology; world English, pidgins and creoles. Pronunciation consultant, Oxford English Dictionaries. Member of the Higher Education Academy.
Research Interests
Vernacular Speech
My primary research interests are in regional and social English dialectal variation, and I teach undergraduate modules in both of these branches of dialectology. Besides the facts of dialectal difference, and the means by which it is studied, relevant issues in the discipline include the relationship of standard and non-standard dialects, attitudes to variation, and the mechanisms of language change.
I have been closely involved with the Survey of English Dialects (SED) for thirty-seven years. This, the only systematic survey of the dialects of England yet to be carried out, was begun at Leeds by Harold Orton (d.1975) and Eugen Dieth in 1948, and was for many years continued at Sheffield by John Widdowson, with whom I enjoy close collaboration. I also have close links with David Parry’s Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects (SAWD), having been one of its first fieldworkers (1968-70): this survey is now directed by Rob Penhallurick, another of my close colleagues.
The Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC)
In 2005, with Dr Oliver Pickering, then of the Brotherton Library, I completed work on The Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) Project, which was funded by a major Resource Enhancement grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. As a result of this work, a detailed catalogue of the collections of the former Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies of the University, which was dissolved in the early 1980s, has been made available electronically at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/activities/lavc/index.htm, with the material itself held for consultation in the Special Collections of the Library. The full potential of the Archive is thus available for linguists, historians, and others in the research community with interests in the speech, customs, beliefs and practices of traditional British communities.
The conference of the LAVC project was held in March 2005, attended by delegates from universities and academic and municipal libraries and archives nationwide. The final report on the Archive project was accepted as ‘Outstanding’ by the AHRC, and on completion the project was selected as one of five nationally for audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Research Council’s report to Government.
BBC ‘Voices'
My most recent language-variation research has centred on the output from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘Voices’, a major data-collecting and broadcasting initiative of 2004-5 for which I acted as the BBC’s first academic point of contact and fieldworker trainer. This involvement has led to my having access to a large body of professionally-gathered data on vernacular speech, and to my consequent involvement in two large-scale research projects. I lead a team, first assembled by Sally Johnson and me, which in 2007 received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to analyse the materials contained on the project’s website (www.bbc.co.uk/voices): this research, entitled ‘Whose Voices?: Language ideological debates on the interactive website of the BBC Voices project’, is due to end in 2011. Details of this project are to be found at https://access.leeds.ac.uk/RMA/site/default.aspx.
I was also pleased to be closely involved, with British Library colleagues, in the award of a major grant by The Leverhulme Trust for further analysis of ‘Voices’ output, this time concerning the 700+ hours of sound recordings collected by BBC journalists working on the project. This research, ‘Voices of the UK’, is being carried out in London under the direction of Jonnie Robinson (formerly of the LAVC team), and I (with Penhallurick and others) serve on the project’s Advisory Committee. The three-year project is due to conclude in February 2012, when a large new recorded speech resource will be available alongside other British Library holdings, which already include substantial material from SED.
Dictionary Pronunciation of English
The accent of British English which is presented in dictionaries is usually known as Received Pronunciation, or simply RP. Like other accents, RP is subject to variation and change: I am responsible for the description of a modern RP model which has been adopted by the latest Oxford English Dictionaries of Oxford University Press, including the iconic Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for which I act as pronunciation consultant. Some of the dictionaries currently displaying this model, other than OED, are The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (editions from 1993 on),The Concise Oxford Dictionary (editions from 1995 on), and The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998, 2003)
In addition, I am the British author for a joint British and American pronouncing dictionary, The Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English (2001), a paperback edition of which appeared in 2003. This book is the result of my collaboration with Professor William A. Kretzschmar and Rafal Konopka of the University of Georgia, USA. Most recently published in the area of English sounds is my Oxford Rhyming Dictionary (2004), written with my son Eben.
Recent Activities
In 2005 I completed a six-year term as member of the Steering Committee of the International Conferences on Methods in Dialectology (the ‘Methods’ series), and in August 2008 hosted the thirteenth conference in the series, Methods XIII, when more than two hundred dialect scholars from twenty-five countries spent a week discussing the subject of linguistic variation. I am Chair of the National Committee for England and Wales of the European linguistic atlas Atlas Linguarum Europae, and a Council Member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, Britain's oldest dialect organization.
My most recent invitations to speak on language variation at conferences or to research groups have included those from the Finnish-British Society and Department of English (Helsinki), the Royal Geographical Society, and the University of Innsbruck. I have recently given keynote addresses at the annual conferences of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference and the National Association for the Teaching of English and the National Association for the Teaching of English and Other Community Languages (NATECLA).
Teaching
Undergraduate
Language, Text and Context
Language Methodologies and Research Methods
English Dialects in Place
English Dialects in Society
English in Time
English in Space
Undergraduate one-year Dissertation
Postgraduate Teaching and Supervision
MA in English Language and World
Englishes
MA Dialectology and Sociolinguistics
PhD supervision in Language Variation
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