Adam Hexley

Queens' College
  • PhD student
Adam Hexley

Contact

About

Supervisor: Dr Sheila Watts

Research Topic: The Contact Influence of Latin and Old English on the Development of the Early Medieval German Lexicon through its Derivational Markings of Abstractness

Before starting his PhD at the University of Cambridge, Adam completed his MPhil degree also at Cambridge in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic (2021-22) and his BA in French and German Language (2015-2019) at the University of York. In between his BA and MPhil degrees, he completed a PGCE in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford and worked as a secondary school German and French teacher in Oxfordshire. He has also worked in various positions at college and departmental libraries in Oxford and Cambridge during and in between his various degrees.

Conference Papers:

Morphologizing Abstractness: The Old High German Abstract Noun Suffix -heit (‘Abstract Concepts, Perception, and Language: What we think and how we say it’ Workshop; April 2024)

Assessing the Impact of Linguistic Contact on Early Medieval German Abstract Noun Formation (DAAD Medieval German Workshop; July 2025)

Research

Adam's research primarily focusses upon the morphological development of abstract noun suffixes in Early Medieval German (an umbrella term used for Old High German and Old Saxon), and whether this may have been influenced by linguistic contact with speakers of Old English and Latin. His approach falls under the scope of Construction Grammar (CxG), more specifically Relational Morphology (RM), which seeks to explicate how morphological structures may be motivated and produced through other existent examples in a speaker's construct-i-con. His research uses both corpus linguistic techniques and discursive analysis of specific examples. 

He also has side interests in semantics, Old High German/Old Saxon grammar more broadly, Old English poetry, and comparative Germanic philology.

Scholarships/Prizes:

Tiarks/Schröder Scholarship