Elizabeth Hopkins

I am a PhD student at the University of York, funded by the AHRC through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. 

My project investigates morphological variation and change in place-names and lexical texts from the Early Middle English period (c.1100 - 1350). Specifically, I employ quantitative methods from corpus linguistics to explore the nominal and adjectival case-marking of both place-names and common nouns in non-onomastic texts. This should make it possible to evaluate what, if anything, name evidence can tell us about the changes to the inflectional system that occurred in Early Middle English. I draw upon past research in both name studies and historical linguistics, in the hope of bridging the gap between the two disciplines.