Jenny Cheshire

Jenny L. Cheshire is a British sociolinguist and professor at Queen Mary University of London.[1] Her research interests include language variation and change, language contact and dialect convergence, and language in education, with a focus on conversational narratives and spoken English. She is most known for her work on grammatical variation, especially syntax and discourse structures, in adolescent speech and on Multicultural London English.

Professor Jenny Cheshire

Career highlights

Cheshire completed the Certificat pratique de langue française at the Sorbonne in Paris. She earned her B.A. at the London School of Economics and her Ph.D. at the University of Reading. She has been a lecturer at the University of Bath and University of Reading, a lecturer and then senior lecturer at Birkbeck College London from 1983–91, and professor of English linguistics at the University of Fribourg and the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland from 1991-96. She is currently a professor of linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London.[2]

Since 2013 she has been the editor-in-chief of the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Language in Society. She has also served on the editorial boards for: Lynx, Te Reo, English World-Wide, International Journal of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Language and Education, Multilingua.

Cheshire was elected as Fellow of the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences in 2011.[3] To honor her contribution to the field of Sociolinguistics, in 2011, Queen Mary, University of London set up the Jenny Cheshire Sociolinguistics Lecture Series.[4]

Research awards

Cheshire has received numerous research awards recognising her significant contributions to the field of sociolinguistics:

She has also served as a reviewer for many research grant applications from such organisation as: UK Economic and Social Research Council; AHRB/AHRC; Leverhulme Trust, British Academy; Canadian Social Science Research Council; New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology; New Zealand Public Good Research Council; Swiss Fonds National; USA National Science Foundation; Canadian National Science Foundation.

Notable contributions

Following are some of Cheshire's most notable contributions to the field of sociolinguistics:

  • Multicultural London English: principal investigator, working with Paul Kerswill and others, in identifying and defining a new typological language variety, multiethnolect, spoken by young, working-class people in London[5] as well as by multiethnic youth across Europe, including Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France.[6]
  • Adolescent Friendship Groups: Cheshire, Kerswill, Fox and Torgersen (2008) showed that adolescent ethnicity interacts with patterns of friendship to create dense, multi-ethnic "friendship networks" which determine an individual's "choice and degree of use of certain linguistic features". In addition, these researchers identified "a cluster of life-style indicators which seem to be shared by most of the individuals [identified] as potential linguistic innovators."[7]
  • Syntactic Variation: Through multiple variationist studies, Cheshire has shown how analysing the social distribution of a variable syntactic construction sheds light on the nature of pragmatic functions, which provides more insights into the social aspects of language use.[8][9][10] Cheshire et al. have shown the syntactic variation is of a very different nature than phonological or morphological variation. 'Syntax is so central to the construction of discourse that we have to look beyond any superficial alternation to examine what speakers do with their grammar – in other words, to focus on social interaction'.[11]
  • Dialect Levelling: Cheshire, Kerswill, Williams, along with many others, have uncovered significant amounts of dialect levelling in Britain, i.e., "the replacement of local features by others with a wider geographical currency,"[12] through the increased use of non-standard variants in phonology, morphology and syntax occurring throughout the major urban centres of Britain.[13][14][12]
  • World English: Cheshire's edited volume on English around the World brings together varieties of English across 60 countries, covering such typologically distinct varieties as standard English, non-standard dialects, pidgins, creoles, and new Englishes, and describes how linguistic variation and change is happening on a far greater scale than has ever been seen in the world's linguistic history.[15]

Selected works

Among her publications, she has written over ten academic books and over 90 articles in peer-reviewed international research journals and edited collections. Following are some of her most notable publications:

References
  1. "Jenny Cheshire, Linguistics". Queen Mary University of London. Retrieved 7 September 2014.
  2. Debrett's People of Today. http://www.debretts.com/people-of-today/profile/21552/Jenny-CHESHIRE%5B%5D
  3. British Academy. Elections to the Fellowship "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2016-02-01. Retrieved 2016-06-20.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  4. "Jenny Chesire Sociolinguistics Lecture series". Queen Mary, University of London.
  5. Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Sue; Kerswill, Paul; Khan, Arfaan; Torgersen, Eivind. "Multicultural London English: the emergence, acquisition and diffusion of a new variety". www.lancaster.ac.uk. Retrieved 2017-02-06.
  6. Cheshire, Jenny; Nortier, Jacomine; Adger, David (2015). "Emerging Multiethnolects in Europe" (PDF). Queen Mary Occasional Papers Advancing Linguistics. 33: 1–27.
  7. Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Sue; Kerswill, Paul; Torgersen, Eivind (2008). Sociolinguistica Jahrbuch (2008) (PDF). Sociolinguistica. p. 1. doi:10.1515/9783484605299.1. ISBN 9783484605299.
  8. Cheshire, Jenny (2003). Social dimensions of syntactic variation: The case of 'when' clauses (PDF). Social Dialectology. IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society. 16. pp. 245–261. doi:10.1075/impact.16.17che. ISBN 978-90-272-1854-4. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-02-11. Retrieved 2017-02-09.
  9. Cheshire, Jenny (1999). "Taming the Vernacular: Some Repercussions for the Study of Syntactic Variation and Spoken Grammar". Te Reo. 8: 59–80.
  10. Cheshire, Jenny (2005). "Syntactic variation and beyond: gender and social class variation in the use of discourse-new markers" (PDF). Journal of Sociolinguistics. 9 (4): 479–507. doi:10.1111/j.1360-6441.2005.00303.x. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-02-11. Retrieved 2017-02-09.
  11. Cheshire, Jenny; Kerswill, Paul; Williams, Ann (2005). Phonology, grammar and discourse in dialect convergence. In P. Auer, P., F. Hinskens, and P. Kerswill, (eds.) Dialect Change: The convergence and Divergence of Dialects in Contemporary Societies. Cambridge University Press – via https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EV7xEqDys24C&oi=fnd&pg=PA135&dq=Phonology,+grammar,+and+discourse+in+dialect+convergence&ots=0DL_xyHDrj&sig=Sx4aP8iWUkXSCuYSoi-In54AcRc.
  12. Cheshire, Jenny; Gillett, Ann; Kerswill, Paul; Williams, Ann (1999). "The role of adolescents in dialect levelling". Final Report to Economic and Social Research Council.
  13. Cheshire, Jenny; Edwards, Viv (1998). "Lessons from a Survey of British Dialect Grammar". Links & Letters: 61–73. Retrieved 2017-02-06.
  14. Cheshire, Jenny; Fox, Sue; Kerswill, Paul; Torgersen, Eivind (2007). "Linguistic Innovators: The English of Adolescents in London" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-01-26.
  15. Cheshire, Jenny (1991). English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives. https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=1cPLCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq=cheshire+world+english&ots=ohh8PqiVwn&sig=3yK1ryhdfOTydOeeH9FiXeNU8xE#v=onepage&q=cheshire%20world%20english&f=false: Cambridge University Press.CS1 maint: location (link)
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