Dr Sheila Watts
- University Associate Professor
Contact
Location
- Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics
About
Sheila Watts has been a lecturer in German at Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College since 1998. She is currently an Associate Professor in German.
Research
Sheila Watts specializes in the historical linguistics of German and related languages. She has published on verb categories, on verbal prefixes and on gender in Gothic, Old Saxon and Old High German. A further interest is in the history of linguistic ideas about German, where she has published on the grammarian Justus Georg Schottelius and the lexicographer Caspar Stieler.
Recent research projects:
From 2011–2016 Sheila was part of a project group with Anne Breitbarth (Ghent) and George Walkden (Manchester, now Konstanz) working to build a digital Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG). This project has been supported by the Newton Trust, the British Academy and the Government of Flanders. From October 2017–2021 Sheila was a co-investigator on a project, funded by the Norwegian Research Foundation, exploring the Early Germanic Noun Phrase, working with colleagues from Oslo, Manchester, Wuppertal and Konstanz.
With Professor David Willis (Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), Sheila ran three series of workshops on historical morphosyntax and Germanic corpora, supported by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies.
Published works:
‘A prefix-particle verb cycle for Germanic?’ In: Studies in Gothic, eds. Jared S Klein and Artūras Ratkus, Oxford:OUP 2024, pp.141–171.
‘Gender stability, gender loss. What didn’t happen to German.’ In: The Determinants of Diachronic Stability (= Linguistik Aktuell 254). Eds. Anne Breitbarth, Miriam Bouzouita, Lieven Danckaert and Melissa Farasyn. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins 2019, pp. 11–37.
‘The interplay between genre variation and syntax in a historical Low German corpus’. In Diachronic Corpora, Genre and Language Change. Ed. Richard J. Whitt. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins 2018 , pp.281–300. With Melissa Farasyn, George Walkden and Anne Breitbarth.
Continuity and Change in Grammar (= Linguistik Aktuell 159). 2010. Eds. Anne Breitbarth, Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts and David Willis. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Landmarks in the History of the German Language (= British and Irish Studies in German Language and Literature 52). 2009. Eds. Geraldine Horan, Nils Langer and Sheila Watts. Bern, etc.: Peter Lang.
Zur Verbmorphologie germanischer Sprachen. 2001. Eds. Sheila Watts, Jonathan West & Hans-Joachim Solms. (= Linguistische Arbeiten 446). Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Teaching and supervision
Sheila Watts teaches German and Germanic linguistics to students in MML, Linguistics and Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic (ASNaC). She is paper co-ordinator for GE7, ‘German: A Linguistic Introduction’, and for GE8 ‘History of German’. That paper is currently suspended, but she regularly supervises students writing Optional Dissertations in German(ic) linguistics at Part II. Sheila introduced the module on German dictionaries to the introductory GE1/GEA3 paper: she also offers a module on German linguistic thought to the paper GE10, German Literature, Thought and History 1700–1815. The paper ‘Germanic Philology’ in the ASNaC tripos is jointly co-ordinated and taught by Sheila with Professor Richard Dance, and gives students an opportunity to study Gothic and Old High German alongside Old English and Old Norse. At postgraduate level, Sheila has supervised MPhil and PhD student in a range of German(ic) linguistic topics, including (PhD supervisor) adjective inflection in Gothic, the perfect in Old English and Old Saxon, gender assignment in German, and (as second supervisor/advisor) negation in Middle Dutch and syntactic change in Middle Low German. Her current PhD student is working on abstract noun morphology in Old High German.
Dr Watts welcomes inquiries from potential MPhil and PhD students with research interests relevant to her interests in historical morphology, historical lexicography, and other aspects of the older Germanic languages, particularly Gothic, Old High German, and Old Saxon.
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