Dr. Michael Pearce
BA (Kent) MSc (Edinburgh) PGCE (Exeter) Adv. Dip. Ed (Open) PhD (Leeds)
Senior Lecturer (English)
Location:
Priestman Building, City Campus
Phone: 0191 515 2158
Email:
mike.pearce@sunderland.ac.uk
Biography
After acquiring degrees from the universities of Kent and Edinburgh, I taught English as a foreign language in Europe and South East Asia. I then did a PGCE and worked for some years as a secondary school teacher in the UK and South America. While waiting for a bus in Bogota I finally made up my mind to pursue doctoral research and eventually ended up at the school of English at the University of Leeds, where I secured my first academic post in 2001.
Although my PhD was not in dialectology, the great tradition of dialect scholarship at Leeds must have had some effect on me, because after arriving in Sunderland in 2004 I began to develop a keen interest in linguistic variation within the north east, and perceptual dialectology is now one of my main research interests, alongside corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis.
Teaching Areas
Language and Culture, Language and Childhood, Language and Power, Corpus Linguistics
Research Interests
Sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics
Selected Publications
Books
2007 The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies. London: Routledge.
Book chapters
2006 (with Janet Maybin) 'Literature and Creativity in English'. In Goodman, Sharon and Kieran O'Halloran (eds) The Art of English: Literary Creativity. London: Palgrave Macmillian, pp.3-48.
Journal articles
2012 (forthcoming). `Folk-descriptions of Dialect Similarity and Difference in Tyne and Wear'. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 20.
2012 (forthcoming). `"That word so fraught with meaning": The History, Cultural Significance and Current Use of Canny in North East England'. English Studies.
2011 `Exploring a Perceptual Dialect Boundary in North East England'. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 19: pp. 3-22.
2011 `"It isn't geet good, like, but it's canny": A New(ish) Dialect Feature in North East England'. English Today27 (3): pp.1-7.
2009 'A Perceptual Dialect Map of North East England'. Journal of English Linguistics37:2pp. 162-192.
2008 'Investigating the Collocational Behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC using Sketch Engine'. Corpora3:1 pp. 1-29.
2005 'Informalization in UK Party Election Broadcasts 1966-1997'. Language and Literature14:1 pp65-90. (Winner of the 2005 Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) Prize).2004 'The Marketization of Discourse about Education in UK General Election Manifestos'. TEXT24:2 pp.245-265.
2001 'Getting Behind the Image'. Personality Politics in a Labour Party Election Broadcast'. Language and Literature 10:3 pp.211-228.
