Michael Percillier

PD Dr. Michael Percillier is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Mannheim’s School of Humanities, Department of English (Anglistik IV). His research focuses on World Englishes, historical linguistics, and language contact phenomena, particularly medieval language dynamics between Anglo-Norman and Middle English. He leads projects like the BASICS initiative, investigating argument structure borrowing in multilingual contexts. His work bridges historical linguistics and psycholinguistics, addressing cognitive mechanisms in language change.

Key research areas include corpus-based analysis of non-standard linguistic features in literature and digital media, sociolinguistic variation in postcolonial contexts, and the application of the Dynamic Model to medieval language contact. He co-authored Carrying Verbs Across the Channel: Modelling Change in Bilingual Medieval England (2024) and edited the 2024 special issue on cognitive mechanisms in linguistics.

Publications include studies on Middle English diatopic variation, representation of non-standard English in West African and Southeast Asian literature, and linguistic feature analysis in social media forums. His methodological contributions involve lemmatisation tools for historical corpora and statistical analysis frameworks.