Dr Alice Corr BA, MA, MPhil, PhD

Dr Alice Corr

Department of Modern Languages
Lecturer in Modern Languages

Contact details

Email
a.corr@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@linguafrancacam
View my research portal
Address
213, Ashley Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

I am a Lecturer in Modern Languages specialising in the linguistics (especially morphosyntax) and dialectology of the Ibero-Romance language family (Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan and other lesser-known languages such as Asturian, Aragonese, Aranese, Ladino/Judaeo-Spanish, Leonese, Mirandese and Mozarabic). Before coming to Birmingham in 2017, I was a Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Bye-Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. I have also held temporary lectureship positions in Spanish Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary, University of London.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Ibero-Romance Linguistics, Magdalene College, University of Cambridge
  • MPhil in Linguistics, King’s College, University of Cambridge
  • MA in Secondary and Further Education and Language TeachingM_ster Universitario en Formaci_n del Profesorado de Educaci_n Secundaria Obligatoria y Bachillerato, Formaci_n Profesional y Ense_anzas de Idiomas., University of León, Spain 
  • BA (Hons) in Modern & Medieval Languages (Spanish and Portuguese), St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge

Biography

I completed my first degree in Modern and Medieval Languages, specialising in Spanish, Portuguese and Linguistics, at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge (2006-2010), before undertaking a master’s degree in Secondary Language Teaching and Further Education at the University of León, Spain (2011-2011). I then returned to Cambridge to complete an MPhil in Linguistics at King’s College (2011-2012), and subsequently a PhD in Linguistics at Magdalene College (2013-2016), where I also held a Lumley Bye-Fellowship in 2015-16. I was a Drapers’ Company Research Fellow and Director of Studies in Spanish and Portuguese at Pembroke College, Cambridge (2016-2017), and held temporary lectureships at Exeter, Jesus and Trinity Colleges, University of Oxford, before joining the University of Birmingham as a Lecturer in Modern Languages in September 2017.

Teaching

At Birmingham, I teach Hispanic Linguistics and Spanish language and supervise Hispanic Linguistics dissertations. Outside Birmingham, I have taught extensively at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages (covering a variety of modules including the linguistics of Spanish, French and Portuguese; comparative (Ibero-)Romance linguistics; the (comparative) history of French, Ibero-Romance and Romance from Latin to the present day; diachronic (formal) syntax; synchronic/comparative syntax; English-Spanish translation; Romanian language), including undergraduate and graduate research supervision in Linguistics and Translation. I have also taught Spanish Linguistics at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary, University of London.

Postgraduate supervision

Theoretical, descriptive, comparative and/or general linguistics, especially (morpho-)syntax; linguistic diversity and variation; Hispanic and Romance languages and dialectology; understudied/endangered languages; historical and synchronic linguistics; Spanish; Portuguese; Galician; Catalan; Astur-Leonese; Judaeo-Romance; Mirandese; Mozarabic/Andalusi Romance; Navarro-Aragonese; French; Occitan; Italian; Romanian; Latin; the Romance family and its branches (Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance, Italo-Romance, Daco-Romance).

Find out more - our PhD Hispanic Studies  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

Research

I specialise in comparative Ibero-Romance linguistics and dialectology, with a focus on the morphosyntactic variation of Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, Catalan and other understudied Romance varieties which descend from the Latin as originally spoken in the Iberian Peninsula. My research documents the grammatical patterns of these languages, and asks what the structural differences between these closely-related languages can reveal about the mental representation of grammar.

My PhD investigated the extent to which conversational turn-taking and signposting in dialogue is in some sense ‘hardwired’ into the grammatical core of human language, taking variation between members of the Ibero-Romance language family as a testing ground, whereas my most recent project (funded by a Drapers’ Company Research Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge) examines what —beyond geography and genetics— distinguishes the Ibero-Romance branch from other Romance language families, and whether, in fact, we can even talk of an ‘Ibero-Romance’ grammar in terms of these languages’ linguistic properties alone.

My theoretical interests include clause structure; utterance syntax; the syntax-pragmatics interface; complementizers and complementizer systems; auxiliary selection; word order; the status of left-peripheral elements; the notion of subjecthood and ‘expletives’; case marking in Romance; the null subject parameter and typology.

I am also interested in the documentation of understudied and endangered (Ibero-Romance) languages as well as the development of empirically-sound, qualitative methodologies for generative research. I am currently collaborating with colleagues in the UK and Catalonia on initiatives promoting the teaching and learning of theoretical linguistics in secondary education, particularly in the modern foreign language (A-Level) classroom.

Other activities

I run a ‘citizen science’ project #documentatulengua which aims to record the structures of lesser-known languages/non-standard Romance dialects of the Iberian Peninsula by crowdsourcing contributions from native speakers of these linguistic varieties (alicecorr.com/documentatulengua/). I am also part of an initiative to develop a Linguistics component for the Modern Languages A-Level in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, Anglia Ruskin University and Queen Mary, University of London.

Publications

Refereed journal articles


  • Corr, A. 2018. ‘Exclamative’ and ‘quotative’ illocutionary complementisers in Catalan, European Portuguese and Spanish: a study in Ibero-Romance syntactic ‘near-synonmy’. Languages in Contrast: International Journal for Contrastive Linguistics 18 (1).
  • Corr, A. 2017. The grammaticalization of epistemicity in Ibero-Romance: alike processes; unlike outcomes. Journal of Historical Linguistics 7 (1/2), 49-77. DOI:  http://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.7.1-2.03cor
  • Corr, A. 2016. Wide-focus subject-verb inversion in Ibero-Romance: a locative account. Glossa: a Journal of General Linguistics 1 (1): 11. 1–33. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.85.
  • Corr, A. 2016. El cambio lingüístico y la interfaz sintaxis-pragmática: evidencias de las lenguas ibero-románicas. Cuadernos de Lingüística de El Colegio de México 3 (1), 73-118. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24201/clecm.v3i1.27
  • Corr, A. 2015. Overt expletives in Ibero-Romance: a diachronic and diatopic perspective. Revue roumaine de linguistique 60 (2-3), 205-222.iu21q2w

Book chapters

  • Corr, A. & N. Munaro. In prep. Speech acts, discourse and clause type. In A. Ledgeway & M. Maiden (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Romance Linguistics, Cambridge University Press.
  • Corr, A. Forthcoming. Matrix complementizers and ‘speech act’ syntax: formalizing insubordination in Catalan and Spanish.In J. Berns, H. Jacobs and D. Nouveau (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory: Selected Papers from Going Romance Nijmegen 2015. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • Corr, A. Forthcoming. The syntax of Ibero-Romance quotation. In G. Pană Dindelegan, R. Zafiu, A. Dragomirescu, A. Nicolae & I. Nicula Paraschiv (eds.), Romance Syntax. Comparative and Diachronic Perspectives, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • Corr, A. 2015. De la sintaxis a la pragmática: el desarrollo del expletivo ibérico desde el español medieval hasta la actualidad. In J.M. Santos Rovira (ed.), Armonía y contrastes. Estudios de variación dialectal, histórica y sociolingüística del español, Colección Lingüística Hispánica 2, 249-263. Editorial Axac.

Review articles

  • Corr, A. 2017. W. Leo Wetzels, João Costa & Sergio Menuzzi (eds.), The Handbook of Portuguese Linguistics. Estudos de lingüística galega 9, 130-133.
  • Corr, A. Forthcoming. Ernestina Carrilho, Alexandra Fiéis, Maria Lobo & Sandra Pereira (eds.), Romance Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 10. Iberia: an International Journal of Theoretical Linguistics.

Peer-reviewed conference papers

  • Corr, A. 2017. Distance-distributive numeral reduplication in Old Ibero-Romance: a contact hypothesis. 31st edition of Going Romance, University of Bucharest, Romania, 7-9 December.
  • Corr, A. 2017. The grammar of Spanish and Romanian discourse particles: a comparative view. 45th meeting of the Romance Linguistics Seminar (RLS45), Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, 5-6 January.
  • Corr, A. 2016. On Old Portuguese ca (< quia) and Romance micro-variation. 16th International Conference of the Department of Linguistics: Workshop on Formal Approaches to Romance Microvariation (FARM), University of Bucharest, Romania, 25-26 November.
  • Corr, A. 2016. Old Ibero-Romance complementizers and the articulation of the C-domain. Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB 2016), University of York, 6-9 September.
  • Corr, A. 2016. Diversity in the clausal left-edge: insights from Ibero-Romance microvariation. Societas Linguistica Europaea 2016, Naples, 31 August - 3 September.
  • Corr, A. 2016. Structure beyond Force? Evidence for a ‘speech act’ projection from Ibero-Romance. 39th colloquium of Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW39), Göttingen, Germany, 8 April.
  • Corr, A. 2016. The diachrony of Ibero-Romance matrix complementizers. 44th meeting of the Romance Linguistics Seminar (RLS44), Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, 4-5 January.
  • Corr, A. 2015. The syntax of que-initial matrix clauses in Ibero-Romance: a comparative analysis. International Workshop on the Linguistics of Ibero-Romance Languages: Ibero-Romance in Contact and in Contrast (IberoCon2015), University of Ghent, Belgium, 14-16 December.
  • Corr, A. 2015. Insubordination, speech acts and syntax: the view from Ibero-Romance. 29th edition of Going Romance, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands, 10-12 December.
  • Corr, A. 2015. Main-clause que and the syntactic encoding of quotations in Ibero-Romance. 15th International Conference of the Department of Linguistics: Romance Syntax. Comparative and Diachronic Perspectives,University of Bucharest, Romania, 27-28 November.
  • Corr, A. 2015. Ibero-Romance above the CP: evidence from complementizer distribution and the encoding of interlocutor-oriented elements. Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain (LAGB 2015), University College London, 15-18 September.
  • Corr, A. 2015. The grammaticalization of epistemicity in Ibero-Romance: alike processes; unlike outcomes. 22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL22), University of Naples Federico II, Italy, 27-31 July.
  • Corr, A. 2015. From Syntax to Pragmatics: tracing an Iberian expletive from Old to Modern Spanish. IV International Conference on Hispanic Linguistics. Harmony and contrasts, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 21-22 April.
  • Corr, A. 2015. El desarrollo del ‘sujeto expletivo explícito’ en el español desde el siglo XV hasta el día de hoy. XV Congreso Internacional de la Asociación de Jóvenes Investigadores de Historiografía e Historia de la Lengua Española, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain, 8-10 April.
  • Corr, A. 2014. Ibero-Romance ello: an overt expletive subject? 5th Graduate Conference in Linguistics (5EPGL), University of Coimbra, Portugal, 12-13 December.
  • Corr, A. 2014. Overt expletives in Ibero-Romance: a diachronic and diatopic perspective. 14th International Conference of the Department of Linguistics: Current Issues in Linguistic Variation, University of Bucharest, Romania, 28-29 November.
  • Corr, A. 2014. The development of Ibero-Romance ‘overt expletives’: evidence from dialect syntax. 23rd meeting of the Manchester Forum in Linguistics (MFiL), University of Manchester, 13-14 November.
  • Corr, A. 2014. ‘Locative’ wide-focus subject inversion in Ibero-Romance. 42nd meeting of the Romance Linguistics Seminar (RLS42), Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, 3-4 January.

Workshop and seminar papers

  • Corr, A. 2017. Navigating unannotated corpora: problems and solutions for comparative morphosyntactic research across Ibero-Romance dialects. Invited talk for Using corpora for morphosyntactic research workshop, Anglia Ruskin University, 19 May.
  • Corr, A. 2017. Collecting non-standard dialect data online: a case study. Rethinking grammaticality judgments workshop, University of Cambridge, 11 March.
  • Corr, A. 2017. Microvariation in Ibero-Romance and the syntacticization of the utterance. SyntaxLab, Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, 28 February.
  • Corr, A. 2016. The Romanian contribution to a comparative Romance syntax of speech acts. Cambridge – Oxford Workshop on Daco-Romance Linguistics, University of Cambridge, 13 June.
  • Corr, A. 2016. On the syntactic encoding of exclamation in Ibero-Romance. ARC (Anglia Ruskin – Cambridge) Romance Linguistics Seminars, Anglia Ruskin University and University of Cambridge, 27 January.
  • Corr, A. 2015. The syntactic status of vocatives, interjections and discourse particles: a first approximation for Ibero-Romance. Romance Linguistics Seminars, University of Cambridge, 5 May.
  • Corr, A. 2015. The architecture of language: insights from the generative enterprise. Magdalene College Parlour Talks (graduate seminar series), University of Cambridge, 3 February.
  • Corr, A. 2015. Conjunctive que in Ibero-Romance: towards a cartography of complementizers. 

View all publications in research portal