Dr Sheila Watts

  • University Senior Lecturer, Department of German and Dutch
Dr Sheila Watts

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About

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I took my first degrees at the University of Dublin (Trinity College), Ireland, and wrote my PhD thesis on 'Aspect in Old Saxon'. I was a lecturer in German linguistics in Dublin until my move to Cambridge in 1998, where I am now a Senior Lecturer in the German and Dutch Section, Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.

I am a former treasurer of the Forum for Germanic Language Studies, the UK-based association for German(ic) linguists, and am currently a Council member of the Philological Society. 

Research

The expression of time within the verb phrase through categories like tense, aspect and Aktionsart; verbal prefixes; the development of the perfect, and other phenomena linked to grammatical change in the older Germanic languages. I have recently published on the diachronic stability of gender as a category in German. I am a member of a Norwegian Research Council-funded collaborative project on the syntax of noun phrases in the older Germanic languages, and a founding member of the group which is working on the Corpus of Historical Low German, centred in Ghent, Belgium. 

I have supervised the following PhD students to successful completion:

Artūras Ratkus (2010 ) The adjective inflection in Gothic and Early Germanic: Structure and Develpment. 

Morgan Macleod (2012) The perfect in Old English and Old Saxon: The  synchronic and diachronic correspondence of form and meaning,

Emma Corteen (2019) The assignment of grammatical gender in German: Testing Optimal Gender Assignment Theory

I was also a member of the supervisory team of Melissa Farasyn (Gent, 2018) Fitting in or standing out? Subject agreement phenomena in Middle Low German.

Teaching and supervision

I teach on the following undergraduate papers:

German: A Linguistic Introduction (MML/Linguistics, Part IB/IIA); History of the German Language (MML/Linguistics Part II); Germanic Philology (ASNC/MML/Linguistics Part II).

I supervise MPhil student in Linguistics on topics in German and Germanic linguistics and am open to enquiries, especially on historical and sociolinguistic topics.

In summer 2020 I will be teaching on the Historical Sociolinguistics Network summer school on Amrum, in North Friesland.