Dr Paul Cooper PhD

How are language features linked to specific social values? What social meanings are indexed (Silverstein 2003, Eckert 2008) by particular language forms? And where these links are repeated frequently, is the variety in question enregistered (Agha 2003, Johnstone et al. 2006, Beal 2009)? How can we see these social meanings expressed through dialect writing, both historically and today?

I am interested in how the Yorkshire dialect is enregistered, both historically and now (see Cooper 2013, 2015, 2017, 2020). This includes how the variety is represented in writing - in literature as well as in other contexts such as social media and on commodities like T-shirts, coffee mugs, etc. - and the perceptions held by speakers when interviewed (see Cooper 2019).

I am also interested in the ways in which Scouse dialect is perceived and used in educational contexts (see Cooper and Lampropoulou, forthcoming; Lamropoulou and Cooper, forthcoming).

The links between individual sounds, pronunciations, words, etc. with nonlinguistic factors (region, age, gender, social class, etc.). See Cooper (2019) for my work on speaker perceptions of Barnsley English in South Yorkshire, particularly in the pronunciation of the town as "Baaarnsley" with a fronted vowel, [a:].