Christopher Beedham

Dr Beedham graduated with a BSc in German and Russian from the University of Salford, England, in 1976, which included 6 months working as a translator for Intertext, Berlin, GDR, a 3-month study period in Voronezh, Soviet Union, and 3 months studying Russian at the Internat St Georges, Meudon, Paris.  In 1979 he graduated from Salford with a PhD on non-passivizable transitive verbs in modern English, German, and Russian – in which he used the method of exceptions and their correlations (formerly known as the method of lexical exceptions) for the first time - whereby he spent the first two years as a research student in the Sektion TAS (Theoretische und Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft) at the University of Leipzig, GDR. His PhD thesis was published by Narr in 1982 as The Passive Aspect in English, German and Russian (reviewed by Catherine Chvany in Folia Slavica 1987/8.2,3:352-60), and articles summarising the findings were published for German in Deutsch als Fremdsprache 1987/24:160-65, for Russian in Voprosy Jazykoznania 1988/6:63-8, for English in Word 1987/38:1-12, and for general linguistics in the Journal of Linguistics 1981/17:319-27.

From 1979-1981 he worked as a Research Assistant on English for Special Purposes, with some German teaching, at the University of Aston, Birmingham, England. From 1982-1984 he occupied a British Council post as an English Language Teaching Assistant in the English Dept. of the Philological Faculty at Moscow State University, Soviet Union.  From 1984-2018 he worked as a lecturer in the German Dept. in the School of Modern Languages (SoML) at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, teaching the linguistics of modern German, general linguistics (to students in the SoML and generally in the Faculty of Arts), German history 1919 to the present day, 20th century German literature, and German language.

He set up and ran a student exchange programme between St Andrews and the University of Leipzig, GDR, from 1985-1990, during which time 10 Leipzig students of English spent a year at St Andrews, and 15 St Andrews students of German spent a year in Leipzig.  One of the St Andrews students, Fiona Rintoul, wrote a novel based on her experience in Leipzig, The Leipzig Affair, which became a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime.

In 1995 he published German linguistics: An introduction, Munchen: Iudicium.  Reviewed by Christopher M. Stevens, Michigan German Studies 1995 XX.2:165-8;  Bill Dodd, German Journal of the Association for Language Learning (ALL) 1996 14:47-8;  Ralph Hartmann Info Daf: Informationen Deutsch als Fremdsprache 1997 24:198-200;  Michael Townson, Modern Language Review 1997 92.4:1004-6;  Philip E. Webber, Language 1997 73.3:687;  Hans-Jurgen Grimm, Deutsch als Fremdsprache 1998 35(4):247-8.  (Webber 1997 is printed as a Book Notice, but in reality it is a review).

He was Head of the German Dept. from 2006-2016 (except for the calendar year 2011 and the session 2013/14, i.e. for 8 years within a 10-year period), and Director of LISA (the Linguistics Institute of St Andrews) from 2008-2013.

In 2005 he published his major work on the method of exceptions and their correlations, Language and Meaning:  The Structural Creation of Reality, with Benjamins.  Reviewed by Peter Suchsland in Deutsch als Fremdsprache 2005 44(1):51-2, Michael B. Smith in the Modern Language Review 2008 103/1:155-6 and Amy Gregory in LINGUIST List 2006 October Vol-17-3168.  For comments by Randolph Quirk, David Crystal, Gerhard Helbig, M.A.K. Halliday, Karl-Dieter Bunting and Jean-Emannuel Tyvaert see the book's webpage on the publisher's (Benjamins) website.

From 2001-2016 he supervised three PhDs on various topics.  From 2006-2021 he supervised four PhDs which used the method of exceptions and their correlations.  They were:
Warwick Danks, The Arabic Verb:  Form and Meaning in the Vowel-Lengthening Patterns, co-supervised for Arabic by Catherine Cobham (Dept. of Arabic), 2009, Benjamins 2011, reviewed by Michael Waltisberg in Language 2012 88:634-6 and Andrzej Zaborski in Folia Orientalia 2010 50:403-5.
Samirah Aljohani, 'An aspectual analysis of the adjectival passive in English:  Subsective gradience in 2nd participles', 2018. Published with Peter Lang in 2022 under the title How adjectival can a participle be? Subsective gradience in English 2nd participles.
Michelle Leese, 'The impersonal passive in German of the type Es wurde getanzt:  A structural analysis', 2019. Published with Peter Lang in 2022 under the title Form, Meaning and Aspect in the German Impersonal Passive.
Benjamin Catchpole, 'Irregular verbs in German, English and Swedish:  Vowel-consonant and consonant-vowel sequences, and the spling experiment', co-supervised for Swedish by Ted Bergman (Dept. of Spanish), 2021.
Three of Dr Beedham's former PhD students currently (2024) hold a teaching and research post at a university.

He supervised the following MSt (res) [Master of Studies by Research] student:
Mark Dawson, 'Applying the "Method of Exceptions and their Correlations" to the Verb System of Modern French', co-supervised for French by David Evans (Dept. of French), 2020.

The Honours (= 3rd and 4th yr.) modules which Dr Beedham taught which are most closely linked to his research are 'GM3080 Grammatical Rules and Lexical Exceptions in Modern German' (taught and examined in English or German depending on the prevailing circumstances) and 'ML3201 Grammatical Rules and Lexical Exceptions in Modern English'.  His book German Linguistics: An Introduction (Iudicium, 1985) was written mainly on the basis of module GM3080, and his book Language and Meaning was written on the basis of module ML3201.  Most of his PhD students came from those two modules.  In 2002 he taught ML3201 at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel.  In 2007 he taught ML3201 as an international Summer School held at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.  In 2016 he taught (in German, part of) GM3080 at the University of Bonn, Germany, in a Blockseminar, for which he had to apply for and was given a Lehrauftrag (honorary temporary lectureship).

His main research, following on from his work on the passive in modern German, Russian and English carried out in 1976-1979, is on irregular verbs in modern German, Russian, and English, using once again the method of exceptions and their correlations.  He hopes that other linguists will try out the method on their own areas of grammar in their own languages, and to that end he organised the Summer School and Conference on the Method of Lexical Exceptions in St Andrews 2-8 September 2007.  The updated proceedings of this event were published by Peter Lang in 2014 under the title Rules and Exceptions: Using Exceptions for Empirical Research in Theoretical Linguistics (reviewed by Winfried Boeder in Linguistische Berichte 2017 251:357-63 and Werner Abraham in Germanistik 2014 55.1/2:30-31).

Dr Beedham retired in 2018, but continues (2024) to be research active.  As of 2023 he has put his linguistics research on hold for the moment and is carrying out research for a book on the history and politics of Germany from 1945 to the present day.  He taught an Honours (= 3rd and 4th year) module on this topic for many years alongside his German linguistics teaching.  At the same time he is carrying out research for a book on British history and politics from 1945 to the present day.  Obviously, the fact that Dr Beedham lived, worked and studied for 3 yrs. in the GDR as a German speaker and for 2 yrs. in Russia, Soviet Union, as a Russian speaker - experiences which as of 1989/91, fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, can never be repeated - gives him a rare and interesting first-hand knowledge base of and angle on these two books.  It is hoped that both books will be published at roughly the same time.  After that he will return to his linguistics research (see below under 'Future research').

Dr Beedham's main research, which he conducted from 1981-2023, is an investigation of irregular verbs in modern German, Russian and English, and represents an attempt to repeat the method used in his 1976-79 PhD on non-passivizable transitive verbs in modern German, Russian and English, the 'method of exceptions and their correlations' (formerly known as the method of lexical exceptions). The method involves using the lexical exceptions to a grammatical category in order to investigate that category. Furthermore, it involves investigating the same formal construction in more than one language.  His approach to linguistics is descriptive (i.e. non-generative) and (European-)structuralist, building on traditional and pedagogical grammar.  The link with language teaching is that he investigates areas of grammar and lexis which foreign learners find difficult, and for Dr Beedham the ultimate test of the correctness of a new theoretical analysis is if it is taken up by writers of pedagogical grammars.  For the passive he discovered - empirically, by collecting and analysing a large amount of data - that the passive is an aspect not a voice of the verb.  He has recently discovered a pattern in the strong verbs of German and English and the non-productive verbs of Russian (i.e. the 'irregular' verbs of those languages), in which the vowel-consonant sequences (VCs) and the consonant-vowel sequences (CVs) of the (stems of the) irregular verbs, e.g. the VC -eib-and the CV blei- of the German irregular verb bleiben 'to remain', tend to be confined to the irregular verbs only, and not to appear on the regular verbs, thus serving as markers of strong/non-productive conjugation.  Moreover, based on a study of the 7,290 separable verbs in Erich Mater's Deutsche Verben Vol. 9, 74% of German separable prefixes contain a strong verb VC.  Given that prefixes in German have a perfectivising function, this correlation suggests that the German strong verbs have a perfective-type meaning.  Furthermore, monosyllabic function words in German, English and Russian contain irregular verb VCs to a surprisingly high degree:  in German 64%, in English 72%, in Russian 79% (of those function words with a VC).  The aim is to find rules for the formation of the irregular verbs, and given their different form a meaning for them different to the meaning of the regular verbs.

As of 2023 Dr Beedham has put his linguistics research on hold for the moment and is carrying out research for a book on the history and politics of Germany from 1945 to the present day.  He taught an Honours (= 3rd and 4th year) module on this topic for many years alongside his German linguistics teaching.  At the same time he is carrying out research for a book on British history and politics from 1945 to the present day.  Obviously, the fact that Dr Beedham lived, worked and studied for 3 yrs. in the GDR as a German speaker and for 2 yrs. in Russia, Soviet Union, as a Russian speaker - which as of 1989/91, fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union, can never be repeated - gives him a rare and interesting knowledge base of and angle on these two books.  It is hoped that both books will be published at roughly the same time.  After that he will return to his linguistics research (see below under 'Future research').

Dr Beedham retired in 2018, but is still (2024) research active, and as such is now an Honorary Lecturer in the Department of German.  After completion of his book on the history and politics of Germany from 1945 to the present day, and of his book on British history and politics from 1945 to the present day, he plans to write a book on language and ideology in the GDR and West Germany during the Cold War.  For many years Dr Beedham taught Honours module GM4049 Language and Ideology in the GDR and West Germany from 1949 - 1989.

After that he will pick up again his research on irregular verbs.  On completion of that project he will start a new topic, probably gender of the noun in German, Russian and French, again using the method of exceptions and their correlations.

PhD, 'The passive aspect in English, German and Russian', Salford/Leipzig 1979

BSc, German/Russian, Salford 1976