Dr. Michael Percillier
Credit: Katrin Glückler
Academic Staff Member
Consultation hour(s):
appointment on request
appointment on request
Research
Michael Percillier’s research interests include language change, language contact, varieties of English, and corpus linguistics.
In his doctoral dissertation, he examined the structural similarities and differences of postcolonial varieties of English sharing a substrate language but not a colonial history.
During the first project of his postdoc phase (University of Strasbourg, 2013–2015), he analysed the use of non-standard language in literary texts. In his next project Borrowing of Argument Structure in Contact Situations (BASICS), during which he completed his cumulative habilitation thesis, he investigated grammatical change in the medieval contact situation between Middle English and Old French. In this context, he developed a method for lemmatising verbs in Middle English corpora, which is available from the BASICS Toolkit.
He is currently preparing a project investigating the diachronic development of Southeast Asian varieties of English using historical data.
He is co-editor of the journal Mannheim papers in multilingualism, acquisition and change (MAPMAC) and a reviewer for the journals World Englishes, English Today, Text & Talk, Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities, and Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing.
Biographic Information
- Study of the subjects English and French (State Examination in teacher training) at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg, 2001–2008
- Doctoral studies in English philology at the Albert-Ludwigs University of Freiburg with the dissertation Accent unites, syntax divides? Varying degrees of nativisation of English in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, 2008–2012
- Postdoc at the University of Strasbourg in the IDEX-funded project The representations of oral varieties of language in the literature of the English-speaking world, 2013–2015
- Postdoc at the University of Mannheim in the DFG-funded project Borrowing of Argument Structure in Contact Situations (BASICS), 2015–2021
- Habilitation at the University of Mannheim with cumulative habilitation thesis Contact-induced structural change in Middle English: an integrative approach to developing resources and modelling language contact, 2021
- Coordinator of the DFG-funded Research Unit Structuring the Input in Language Processing, Acquisition and Change (SILPAC), since 2022
Teaching
Michael Percillier has been teaching at universities since 2010, primarily on the topics of World Englishes and diachronic linguistics. He has also held workshops on statistic analysis for linguists using R.
He completed the Baden-Württemberg Certificate for Teaching and Learning at University Level in 2021. In this context, he co-developed the instructional website on corpus linguistic methods Toolbox Anglistik IV.
Publications
- Percillier, M. & Schauwecker, Y. (2024). Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change: introduction to the special issue. Linguistics Vanguard, 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2023-0164
- Percillier, M. (2020). A variationist approach to the spread of emergent features in Middle English. Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines : RANAM, 53(1), 23–36.
- Percillier, M. (2018). The non-standard in writing: A look at West African and Southeast Asian literature. E-REA : Revue Électronique d’Études sur le Monde Anglophone, 15(2), No. 6312. https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.6312
- Percillier, M. & Paulin, C. (2017). A corpus-based investigation of world Englishes in literature. World Englishes : WE, 36(1), 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1111/weng.12208
- Percillier, M. & Paulin, C. (2017). Postcolonial literature and world Englishes: A corpus-based approach of modes of representation of the non-standard in writing. International Journal of Literary Linguistics : IJLL, 6(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.15462/ijll.v6i1.102
- Paulin, C. & Percillier, M. (2015). Oral varieties of English in a literary corpus of West African and South East Asian prose (1954–2013): commitment to local identities and catering for foreign readers. Études de Stylistique Anglaise, 9(1), 59–79.
- Percillier, M. (2015). Non-standard features of Asian Englishes in comment forums of social news websites. Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Américaines : RANAM, 48, 31–50.
- Percillier, M. & Trips, C. (2020). Lemmatising verbs in Middle English corpora: The benefit of enriching the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English 2 (PPCME2), the Parsed Corpus of Middle English Poetry (PCMEP), and A Parsed Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (PLAEME). In N. Calzolari (eds.), LREC 2020 : twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation$d May 11–16 , 2020, Marseille, France : conference proceedings (S. 7172–7180). , ELRA: Paris.
- Percillier, M. (2019). Dynamic modelling of medieval language contact: The case of Anglo-Norman and Middle English. In R. Schöntag (eds.), Diachrone Migrationslinguistik: Mehrsprachigkeit in historischen Sprachkontaktsituationen : Akten des XXXV. Romanistentages in Zürich (08. bis 12. Oktober 2017) (S. 79–99). Sprache, Mehrsprachigkeit und sozialer Wandel, Peter Lang: Berlin.
- Percillier, M. (2018). A toolkit for lemmatising, analysing, and visualising Middle English data. In A. U. Frank (eds.), CRH-2 : proceedings of the Second Workshop on Corpus-based Research in the Humanities 25–26 January 2018 Vienna, Austria (S. 153–160). Gerastree Proceedings, Dept. of Geoinformation, TU Wien: Wien.
- Schneider, G., Pettersson, E. & Percillier, M. (2017). Comparing rule-based and SMT-based spelling normalisation for English historical texts. In G. Bouma (eds.), Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2017 Workshop on Processing Historical Language : 22 May 2017, Gothenburg (S. 40–46). NEALT Proceedings Series, Linköping University Electronic Press: Linköping.
- Percillier, M. (2016). Verb lemmatization and semantic verb classes in a Middle English corpus. In S. Dipper (eds.), Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Natural Language Processing (KONVENS) Bochum, Germany September 19–21, 2016 (S. 209–214). Bochumer linguistische Arbeitsberichte : BLA, Ruhr-Universität Bochum: Bochum.
- Percillier, M. (2016). World Englishes and second language acquisition : Insights from Southeast Asian Englishes . Amsterdam ; Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g58
- Percillier, M. (2024). The outer and expanding circles in Southeast Asia. In A. J. Moody (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Southeast Asian englishes (S. 15–33). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Percillier, M. (2022). Adapting the Dynamic Model to historical linguistics : Case studies on the Middle English and Anglo-Norman contact situation. In B. Los (eds.), English historical linguistics : historical English in contact : papers from the xxth ICEHL (S. 6–33). Amsterdam [u.a.]: Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cilt.359.02per
- Keller, M. (2021). Developing a structural template for historical code-switching.. In E. Glaser, M. Prinz & S. Ptashnyk (eds.), Historisches Codeswitching mit Deutsch : multilinguale Praktiken in der Sprachgeschichte (S. 437–464). Berlin ; Boston, Mass.: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110752793-015
- Percillier, M. (2020). Allostructions, homostructions or a constructional family? Changes in the network of secondary predicate constructions in Middle English. In L. Sommerer (eds.), Nodes and networks in diachronic construction grammar (S. 214–242). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/cal.27.06per
- Percillier, M. (2017). Creating and analyzing literary corpora. In S. Hai-Jew (eds.), Data analytics in digital humanities (S. 91–118). Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54499-1_4
- Percillier, M. (2017). Une brève introduction à l'analyse statistique avec R. In C. Schnedecker (eds.), Le doctorat en France : mode(s) d'emploi (S. 205–220). Brussels: Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.3726/b13090
- Percillier, M. (2016). Cunning linguistics: The semantics of word play in South Park. In K. Beers Fägersten (eds.), Watching TV with a linguist (S. 139–160). Syracuse ; New York, NY: Syracuse University Press.
- Percillier, M. (2016). Postcolonial and learner Englishes in Southeast Asia: implications for international communication. In G. Leitner (eds.), Communicating with Asia : the future of English as a global language (S. 135–152). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107477186.010