I am Professor of English Language & Linguistics at Roehampton University, London, 60 years on since I joined the Preparatory Department of MHSG.

I loved school life. Language was always of interest but it took a while for me to make it my focus. I went to Oxford to read English where my peers were in the vanguard of cool’ (whereas I remained decidedly uncool)!

I enjoyed participating in netball, musical events, and productions of The White Devil and The Revenger’s Tragedy, but as my time in Oxford ended, I decided to shift my focus to language.

I became a Language Assistant in France and recall the memorable lecture from my time at the Sorbonne when I discovered linguistics. The subject became my holy grail as I studied for an MA at University College London with the charismatic Randolph Quirk. I then became a Research Assistant at the Survey of English Usage at UCL, a corpus of English. It was highly innovative in that it included spoken, as well as written language.

During this time I married, had two children, and relocated to Merseyside. I taught in a local FE college but wanted to do more. Professor Geoffrey Leech, a tutor from my MA, was setting up a million-word computer-based corpus of British English to match the corpus of American English at Brown University in the US. I was appointed as a Research Fellow and investigated the modal auxiliaries (a finite set of words including may, must, can, will, shall) in these two corpora and compared them

During this time I had another child and was teaching at Edge Hill College, when I discovered a new branch of linguistics known as sociolinguistics. Sociolinguists insist that language analysis should always take social context into account. I was frustrated by the paucity of books in this area, so wrote one myself entitled;  Women, Men and Language.

I began to collect my own spoken data – the conversations of women friends – and this research project kept me very busy. I spent a year at Melbourne University in Australia writing another book, Women Talk, and subsequently collected a corpus of men’s friendly conversation, the result being Men Talk. 

One of the best things about being an academic is meeting inspirational people in some of the most wonderful places in the world. I am approaching retirement and while writing and research will remain an integral part of my life, I look forward to non-academic pursuits such as walking, dancing and meeting old friends.  My basic philosophy is: live life exuberantly!