Professor Neil Bermel
BA (Yale), MA, PhD (Berkeley), Professor of Russian and Slavonic Studies
Contact details
Telephone: +44 (0)114 222 7405
email : n.bermel@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
A native of New York, I studied Russian at university and picked up Czech in graduate school as a secondary interest that has gradually become my primary one. I came to Sheffield in 1996 as lecturer in Czech language and linguistics and, from September 2007, am serving as Head of Department.
I have held roles in the national Slavonic studies associations in the UK (BASEES) and the US (AATSEEL), as well as Czech studies internationally (IATC). Along the way, I have led two projects for creating electronic resources for language teaching in collaboration with the LDMU and CILASS at Sheffield, and have been involved in the local Czech and Slovak communities in the city.
When not engaged in weighty academic pursuits, I can often be found taking long but not overly strenuous walks through the Derbyshire countryside.
Research interests
My research has centred on variation in grammar and form in Czech and Russian. Currently it has two major strands: study of the processes of formal and informal regulation of language; and corpus-based studies of language usage in Czech. I am particularly interested in the intersection between language usage and language regulation. I maintain an interest in contemporary Czech literature, having translated two novels by the Czech author Pavel Kohout and a volume of short stories by Daniela Fischerova.
Recent publications
- „Pravidla jako cukr nebo bič? Pravopis v Českém národním korpusu [Spelling rules: a carrot or a stick? Orthography in the Czech National Corpus].“ Naše řeč 91 (2008): 1-12, 57-67. (Naše řeč is the journal of the Czech Language Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences.)
- Linguistic Authority, Language Ideology, and Metaphor: The Czech Spelling Wars. Language Power and Social Process 17. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007. 369 pp.
- „Tvary minulého příčestí v Českém národnim korpusu: táh, táhl, či táhnul? [Forms of the past participle in the Czech National Corpus: táh, táhl, or táhnul?]“ In František Čermák, Karel Kučera and Vladimír Petkevič, eds. Korpusová lingvistika: stav a modelové přístupy [Corpus linguistics: its state and model approaches]. Prague: Karolinum, 2006.
- „V korpuse nebo v korpusu? Co nám řekne (a neřekne) ČNK o morfologické variaci v tvarech lokálu [V korpuse or v korpusu? What the Czech National Corpus can (and can’t) tell us about variation in the locative singular]“ In Hladková, Zdena and Petr Karlík, eds. Čeština – univerzália a specifika 5 [The Czech language – universals and specifics, vol. 5], Prague: Nakladatelství Lidové Noviny, 2004: 163-171.
- “Standard and standardized verb forms in the Czech National Corpus.” In Blatná, Renata and Vladimír Petkevič, eds. Jazyky a jazykověda: Sborník k 65. narozeninám prof. Františka Čermáka [Languages and linguistics: A festschrift in honour of Professor František Čermák’s 65th birthday]. Prague: Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy, 2004: 487-502.
- Register Variation and Language Standards in Czech. Lincom Europa, Studies in Slavic Linguistics 13, 2000. 132 pp.
Download a list of Neil's publications and conference/seminar papers (PDF, 110KB)
Recent invited talks
- Pravopisné změny a jejich implementace ve světle Českého národního korpusu [Orthographic changes and their implementation as seen through the Czech National Corpus]. Czech Language Institute, Masaryk University, Brno, 2007.
- O takzvané české diglosii v moderním světě [On so-called Czech diglossia in the modern world]. Prague Linguistic Circle, 2005.
- Zespisovněné a pospisovněné tvary v Českém národním korpusu [Standard and standardised forms in the Czech National Corpus]. Computational Linguistics Seminar, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, 2005.
- Slovesné tvary jak konkurují/konkurujou v ČNK [Competition between verbal forms in the Czech National Corpus]. Korpus jako zdroj dat o češtině [Corpora as a Source of Data on Czech], Brno, Czech Republic, 2004.
- Does diglossia work? The case of Czech. Department of Linguistics, Cambridge University, 2003.
Research students currently supervised
- Teresa Wigglesworth-Baker
Teaching
- RUS348-349 Intermediate Czech I-II
- RUS381-382 Varieties of Written and Spoken Czech I-II
- RUS385 Project in Czech Studies
- RUS387 Czech to English Translation
- RUS302 Russian Language (Advanced): Translation Skills
- RUS3622 The Structures of Russian
- RUS6010 Advanced Translation from Russian
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