James is a specialist in historical linguistics and language variation and change, with a focus on early Germanic languages and variationist sociolinguistics. He is particularly interested in using modern analytical techniques to examine historical data. He also enjoys examining the factors that influence the linguistic choices we make in everyday conversation. His work combines variationist quantitative methods with corpus-based approaches to explore a multitude of questions.

He also has a strong background in education and second language acquisition, receiving his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Purdue University where his doctoral work focused on applied historical linguistics. Currently, he teaches courses on the history of the English language, language myths, and plans to offer courses on sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and the language, literature, and culture of Early Germanic people.

James was recently interviewed by CBC Radio on “the role of historical linguistics in second language learning”?

A large body of his work to date has focused on intensification, examining how intensifiers develop, how they compete, how they change, and they are conditioned across space and time. He has published on English, German, and Norwegian, and is currently working on intensification in Old English, Old Saxon, Old Frisian, and Gothic. He has also worked on socially conditioned lexical variation, exploring how factors such as gender and age influence the words we use in daily conversation. He has published in outlets such as the Journal of Historical Linguistics, Journal of Germanic Linguistics, English Studies, English Today, as well as handbooks, volumes, and encyclopedias. He also specializes in variation and change in British English, with several publication addressing specific changes in British dialects over time.

Selected Publications:

Stratton, James. (2022). Intentional and Incidental Vocabulary Learning: The Role of Historical Linguistics in Second Language Learning. The Modern Language Journal, 106(4).

Stratton, James & John Sundquist. (2022). A Variationist Sociolinguistic Analysis of Intensifiers in Oslo-Norwegian. Journal of Germanic Linguistics, 34(4), 385-419.

Stratton, James. (2022). Old English Intensifiers. The Beginnings of the English Intensifier System. Journal of Historical Linguistics 12(1), 31-69.

Stratton, James. (2022). Tapping into German Adjective Variation. A Variationist Sociolinguistic Approach. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 34(1), 63-102.

Stratton, James. (2021). ‘That’s proper cool’. The Emerging Intensifier proper in British English. English Today 37(4), 206-213.

Stratton, James. (2020). Corpora and Diachronic Analysis of English. In Eric Friginal and Jack A. Hardy (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Approaches to Discourse Analysis, 202-218. London & New York: Routledge.

Stratton, James. (2020). A Diachronic Analysis of the Adjective Intensifier well from Early Modern English to Present Day English. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 65(2), 216-245.

Stratton, James. (2020). Fiction as a Source of Linguistic Data: Evidence from Television Drama. Token: A Journal of English Linguistics 10, 39-58.

Stratton, James. (2020). Adjective Intensifiers in German. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 32(2), 183-215.

Stratton, James. (2018). The Use of the Adjective Intensifier well in British English: A Case Study of The Inbetweeners. English Studies 99(8), 793-816.

Stratton, James. (2018). The Use of the Generic Masculine, the Derivational Suffix -in and Gender-Fair Innovations in Unrehearsed Spoken Dialogue in Modern Standard German. Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis 23(1), 1-52.