George Walkden

English Linguistics MEd oral exam

For the MEd oral exam in English Linguistics, you need to sign up online using this form.

Deadlines for internal registration are:

  • For the spring exam: 15th June
  • For the autumn exam: 30th December

of the preceding year. Here also is some information on the possible examiners for English Linguistics.

Office hours (Sprechstunde)

Mondays 15:00-16:00. Outside this time, please email me to make an appointment.

Lectures and seminars

I am currently (summer semester 2026) teaching the following courses:

  • History of the English Language (Ling 172 SHE II).
  • English historical corpus linguistics (with Marc Meisezahl).
  • English exam colloquium (with Nadine Bade).
  • Syntax and semantics of complementation (with Maribel Romero).

In Konstanz I have previously taught the following courses:

Winter semester 2025-26:

  • Historical linguistics. (ZEuS)
  • The morphology-syntax interface. (ZEuS)
  • Multilingualism in medieval Britain. (ZEuS)
  • MEd English exam colloquium and syntax-semantics research colloquium. (with Nadine Bade; ZEuS)

Winter semester 2024-25:

  • Structure and History of English I. (ZEuS)
  • Theories of pro-drop (with Miriam Butt). (ZEuS)
  • Old English. (ZEuS)
  • Syntax research colloquium and MEd exam colloquium. (ZEuS)

Winter semester 2022-23:

Summer semester 2022:

  • History of the English Language (Ling 172 SHE II). (ILIAS)
  • Old English and its closest relatives (with Raquel Montero). (ILIAS)

Winter semester 2021-22:

  • Syntax III: Theories of agreement in syntax. (ILIAS)
  • SHE III: Language contact in early English (with Gemma McCarley). (ILIAS)

Summer semester 2021:

  • History of the English Language (Ling 172 SHE II). (ILIAS)

Winter semester 2019-20:

Summer semester 2019:

  • History of the English Language (Ling 172 SHE II). (ILIAS) (lecture recordings)
  • Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings: language contact in early English (SHE III). (ILIAS)
  • Early Modern English: emerging voices, 1500-1800. (ILIAS)
  • English Syntax (Ling 114) (with Julia Bacskai-Atkari). (ILIAS)
  • Forschungs- und Examenskolloquium (Ling 391). (ILIAS)

Winter semester 2018-19:

Summer semester 2018:

  • History of the English Language (Ling 172 SHE II). (ILIAS) (lecture recordings)
  • Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings: language contact in early English (SHE III). (ILIAS)
  • Morphology III: Morphological Frameworks (Ling 313). (ILIAS)
  • English Syntax (Ling 114). (ILIAS)
  • Forschungs- und Examenskolloquium (Ling 391). (ILIAS)

Winter semester 2017-18:

  • Old English (Ling 326). (ILIAS)
  • Syntax III: Minimalist Syntax. (ILIAS)
  • Germanic Philology and Corpus Methods. (ILIAS)
  • Forschungs- und Examenskolloquium (Ling 391). (ILIAS)

Summer semester 2017:

  • History of the English Language (Ling 172 SHE II). (ILIAS) (lecture recordings)
  • Anglo-Saxons, Celts and Vikings: language contact in early English (SHE III). (ILIAS)
  • Morphology III (Ling 313). (ILIAS)
  • Historical Linguistics (Ling 321). (ILIAS)
  • Forschungs- und Examenskolloquium (Ling 391). (ILIAS)

Postgraduate research supervision

I'm always happy to receive proposals from graduate students who want to work on topics related to my research interests: historical linguistics, morphosyntax, and the Germanic languages.

PhD supervision

  • Miray Gökkaya: Null arguments and ellipsis in diachrony. (main supervisor; second supervisor is Maribel Romero)
  • Leah Doroski: On the nature of attitude predicates and Neg-Raising. (second supervisor; main supervisor is Maribel Romero)
  • Chiara Riegger: Prosodically conditioned morpho-syntactic changes in early West Germanic. (joint supervision with Tina Bögel)
  • David Diem: Multiple spell-out in syntactic doubling chains. (main supervisor; second supervisor is Miriam Butt, third supervisor is Colin Davis)
  • Molly Rolf (Konstanz, 2025): On the morphosyntactic shift from case to adpositions (main supervisor; second supervisor is Bernhard Brehmer)
  • Raquel Montero Estebaranz (Konstanz, 2024): Mood alternations: a synchronic and diachronic study of negated complement clauses. (main supervisor; second supervisor is Maribel Romero)
  • Gemma McCarley (Konstanz, 2024): Examining the Subject Cycle: null-subject loss among adult L2 Learners in AHLAs. (main supervisor; second supervisor is Georg A. Kaiser)
  • Katharina Kaiser (Konstanz, 2024): Wortstellungsalternation in wh-in-situ-Interrogativsätzen des Französischen und brasilianischen Portugiesischen: eine experimentelle Studie (Word order alternations in wh-in-situ interrogative clauses in French and Brazilian Portuguese: an experimental study) (second supervisor; main supervisor is Georg A. Kaiser)
  • Tian Li (Konstanz, 2024): The grammaticalization process of Mandarin topic markers. (main supervisor; second supervisor was Regine Eckardt)
  • Frederik Hartmann (Konstanz, 2021): The dissolution of Germanic unity: towards a new computational model. (main supervisor; second supervisor was Gerhard Jäger)
  • Victoria Thomas (Manchester, 2018): Auxiliary omission in German embedded clauses from 1650 to 1800: a corpus study. (jointly with Kersti Börjars)
  • Henri Kauhanen (Manchester, 2018): Neutrality, biases and social network effects in language change. (jointly with Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero and Tobias Galla)
  • Laura Arman (Manchester, 2015): The Welsh impersonal and passive constructions. (jointly with Andrew Koontz-Garboden and John Payne)

I have also been involved as external committee member or examiner for the following dissertations:

  • Danny Bate (Edinburgh, 2024): Reconstructing the left peripheries of Proto-Indo-European
  • Tara Struik (Nijmegen, 2022): Information structure triggers for word order variation and change: the OV/VO alternation in the West Germanic Languages
  • Jordan Kodner (Penn, 2020): Language acquisition in the past
  • Christin Beck (née Schätzle) (Konstanz, 2018): Dative subjects: historical change visualized
  • Espen Klævik-Pettersen (Oslo, 2018): Inversion, V-to-C, and verb-second: an investigation into the syntax and word order of Old French and Late Latin
  • Melissa Farasyn (Ghent, 2018): Fitting in or standing out? Subject agreement phenomena in Middle Low German
  • Meta Links (Nijmegen, 2018): Correlative constructions in earlier English: clause structure and discourse organisation
  • Man Li (Newcastle, 2017): Fronting constructions in Chinese from synchronic and diachronic perspectives
  • Tam Blaxter (Cambridge, 2017): Speech in space and time: Contact, change and diffusion in medieval Norway
  • Hofa Meng-Jung Wu (Newcastle, 2015): The syntax of polar questions and their answers in Taiwanese

MA thesis supervision

Only theses on which I am the first supervisor are listed here.

  • Moreno Quartarone (Konstanz, 2026): Mapping speech acts and status: a diachronic analysis of 17th-18th century trials and letters
  • Paul Zodl (Konstanz, 2025): How to become a strict Negative Concord language: the diachrony of Yiddish negative indefinites
  • Ann-Sophie Bührer (Konstanz, 2025): French influence in Middle English translations of La Somme le Roi
  • Lea-Marie Brenner (Konstanz, 2025): The evolution and function of -ing complements in Early Modern English texts
  • Sarah Einhaus (Konstanz, 2023): The effects of paradigm structure in contact situations: an artificial language learning experiment
  • Agathe Miellot (Konstanz, 2023): Multilingualism in Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots
  • Chiara Riegger (Konstanz, 2023): Old Saxon vowel epenthesis: an analysis of manuscripts M, C, and V
  • Matías Hernández Cornejo (Konstanz, 2023): The phonetic and phonological nature of the Old English /r/: A systematic literature review
  • Sijing Meng (Konstanz, 2023): Comparative study of Chinese and English word-formation
  • Sophie Bernlochner (Konstanz, 2023): Cross-linguistic influence and anglicization in the letters of Mary Stuart
  • Owen Brown (Konstanz, 2022): Soziale Effekte auf die Variation in siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Verbclustern [Social effects on variation in Transylvanian Saxon verb clusters]
  • Susanne Lentjes (Konstanz, 2022): Preposition stranding in the Middle English period: a text-based analysis
  • Marianna Brevetti (Konstanz, 2022): Politeness in Bess of Hardwick’s letters: a historical and sociolinguistic analysis
  • Kathleen Frank (Konstanz, 2021): The influence of language contact on the English language: Can French language contact explain the language changes in Middle English?
  • Nadine Keller (Konstanz, 2020): “It depends on if you like it”: Acceptance of embedded polar questions introduced by if as prepositional complements
  • Helen Ranyai (Konstanz, 2019): Die Kurdischen Dialekte: Phonologische und Morphologische Varietäten in Kurmanjî und Soranî [Kurdish dialects: phonological and morphological variation in Kurmanjî and Soranî]
  • Marc Meisezahl (Konstanz, 2019): Word order in subordinated clauses in the Surselva
  • Larissa Trescher (Konstanz, 2018): The productivity of German plural markers: a diachronic approach
  • Andrew Wells (Manchester, 2016): Water metaphors in political discourse
  • Khawla Ghadgoud (Manchester, 2013): Jespersen's Cycle in Libyan Arabic and Nafusi Berber
  • Fernanda McDougall (Manchester, 2012): Linguistic variation and dialect levelling in the speech community of Barrow-in-Furness
  • Meredith McMurray (Manchester, 2012): A historical analysis of the verb 'to want'
  • Betsy Snider (Manchester, 2012): Variation in the -en/n perfect participle of irregular verbs in American vs. British English 1850 to 1999

Past teaching

Tartu 2019

On an Erasmus visit to Tartu in October 2019 I taught a minicourse on theories of language change. Drop me a line if you're interested in the materials.

EGG 2016

Looking for my EGG 2016 materials on V2? You can find them here: Verb-second

Email if you're interested in my materials on syntactic change or the introduction to syntactic theory.

Manchester

In Manchester I taught the following courses:

  • Historical Syntax (LELA30961-2), including an enhanced MA version (LELA60691-2).
  • Introduction to Old English Language (LELA20091).
  • Language Change (LELA60052).
  • Introduction to Historical Linguistics (LELA10172).
  • Introducing English Grammar (LELA10041).
  • English Corpus Linguistics (LELA70472).

Resources complementing the Introduction to Historical Linguistics lectures can be found here.

In 2013 I was nominated by students, and shortlisted, for Best Humanities Lecturer at the Union Teaching Awards.

Cambridge

I also taught for several courses as a graduate student at Cambridge. These include:

  • 2011. Linguistics Paper LT13 (History of the English Language).
  • 2010-2011. Linguistics Paper LT4 (History and Varieties of English).
  • 2010-2011. Linguistics Paper LT11 (Historical Linguistics).
  • 2009-2010. MML Paper Ge1 (Introduction to the Structures and Varieties of Modern German).
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