Prof. Dr. Erik Schleef – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Prof. Dr. Erik Schleef

University of Salzburg
Linguistics

External Senior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP)
October 2022 – June 2023

Last Update: 31.08.2023

Curriculum Vitae

Erik Schleef is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Professor Schleef received a doctorate from the University of Michigan in 2005. He subsequently held appointments as lecturer and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Manchester. His research focuses on language variation and change (in particular, discourse, phonetic and phonological variation in dialects of the British Isles), the acquisition of variation, sociolinguistics and perception, as well as language and gender. He has also published widely on methods in sociolinguistics. He is co-editor of the Routledge Sociolinguistics Reader and co-author of Doing Sociolinguistics: A Practical Guide to Data Collection and Analysis. In collaboration with colleagues from Sociology, Anthropology, Criminology, Politics and Social Statistics at the University of Manchester, he received significant funding from the Nuffield Foundation aimed at improving quantitative methods teaching in the Social Sciences. Professor Schleef currently holds a grant from the Austrian Science Foundation on the perception of speech pauses and pragmatic markers in English.

Selected Publications

Schleef, Erik. 2022. Mechanisms of meaning making in the co-occurrence of pragmatic markers with silent pauses. Language in Society, 1-27.
Schleef, Erik. 2021. Individual differences in intra-speaker variation: /t/-glottalling in England and Scotland. Linguistics Vanguard 6, 1-11.
Schleef, Erik and Danielle Turton. 2018. Sociophonetic variation of like in British dialects: Effects of function, context and predictability. English Language and Linguistics 22, 35-75.
Schleef, Erik. 2017. Social meanings across listener groups: When do social factors matter? Journal of English Linguistics 45, 1-32.
Meyerhoff, Miriam, Erik Schleef and Laurel MacKenzie. 2015. Doing sociolinguistics: A practical guide to data collection and analysis London and New York: Routledge.

FRIAS Project

Measuring language attitudes: New methods, new challenges

Research into language attitudes investigates the stigma and discrimination associated with certain language varieties (e.g. non-standard dialects) and language features (e.g. non-standard pronunciations). This study explores well-established as well as more recent language attitude methods used in two disciplines: linguistics and social psychology as relations between specific methods remain unclear. Four experimental designs exploring the evaluation of three language features will be investigated. This will allow us to assess to what extent these methods are comparable and whether their theoretical assumptions can be integrated.