Dr Joshua Booth
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Location
- Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
About
Joshua Booth is a theoretical phonologist with a special interest in Germanic languages, in particular the mental representation of speech sounds and their role in historical language change. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford in 2023, with his thesis drawing on manuscript evidence to investigate the development of the German phonological system from the mediæval to the modern period. Following his doctorate, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Language and Brain Laboratory, using experimental psycholinguistic methods to explore the ways in which phonological structures are represented and processed in the minds of present-day speakers. He is currently Assistant Professor in German Linguistics in the University of Cambridge’s MMLL Faculty, where his work continues to combine theoretical phonology, historical linguistics and experimental approaches. Recent research has explored the structural consequences of historical language change and their impact on modern speakers, particularly speakers of German and other closely related Germanic languages.
Research
Research areas:
· Germanic linguistics: Comparative Germanic linguistics; focus on variation and change in West Germanic languages, particularly English and German (with additional interest in North Germanic).
· Phonology: Prosody (particularly issues of quantity, foot structure and lexical stress); metrical phonology; feature theory; morphophonology; historical and diachronic phonology; the phonetics–phonology interface.
· Psycholinguistics: Experimental psycholinguistics, focusing on processing phonological representations and morphological complexity; prosodic units and foot structure; phonological phrasing.
· Historical linguistics: Phonological change; synchronic structure of present and past stages of Germanic languages; diachronic change in Germanic, particularly Old and Middle High German and Old and Middle English.
Recent research papers include:
· Booth, Joshua & Aditi Lahiri. In press. (Non-)alternating umlaut in English and German: Whither /y/? Phonology.
· Lahiri, Aditi, Joshua Booth, Isabella Fritz, Emily Lindsay-Smith, Johanneke Sytsema & Hilary Wynne. In press. ‘Pertinacity in diachrony and synchrony’, in Historical Linguistics 2023. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
· Booth, Joshua, Felicia Stich, Isabella Fritz & Aditi Lahiri. 2026. Through dick and dünn: Cognates and the legacy of diachronic change in synchronic language processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2026.2683473
· Booth, Joshua & Aditi Lahiri. 2023. ‘Foot Structure in Germanic’. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. 20th September 2023. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.962
· Booth, Joshua. 2023. Open syllable lengthening and diphthongisation in Upper Middle High German: Evidence from verse. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 26: 5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-023-09145-3
· Booth, Joshua. 2023. Rethinking the metre of Parzival: Iambic verse for a trochaic language. Transactions of the Philological Society 121(1): 91–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/TRPS.12257
For a full list of publications, see https://joshuabooth.com/publications.html
Teaching and supervision
Dr Booth teaches German linguistics to undergraduate MMLL students, covering topics in both historical and contemporary linguistics and introducing students to Old, Middle and Early Modern German texts. He is currently responsible for the teaching of paper GE7 (German: A linguistic introduction) and the dictionary module for the introductory GE1/GEA3 paper. Dr Booth is also available for supervision of optional dissertations. At the graduate level, he is open to enquiries from prospective students interested in topics in Germanic linguistics, particularly relating to theoretical phonology and language change.
Course contact for GE7 German: A Linguistic Introduction