Research Profiles
Susan Fitzmaurice
Susan Fitzmaurice's research focuses on the history of the English language, using methodological perspectives provided by historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. She is particularly interested in exploring the methods and kinds of evidence employed in historical approaches to language study.
She is currently conducting research on change in Zimbabwean English after 1980, together with a project on the history of the English language in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. The first publication in the project, 'White Zimbabwean English', appears in The Lesser-Known Varieties of English, (eds.) Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider, & Jeffrey P. Williams. Cambridge University Press (2010).
Susan Fitzmaurice's work in historical pragmatics focusses on the language of letters as evidence for the historical reconstruction of meaning. Fitzmaurice's research on English in the eighteenth century utilizes the frameworks of social networks analysis, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis.
Her data are drawn principally from the Network of Eighteenth century English texts (NEET). This is a large unconventional historical electronic corpus of letters, fiction, prose drama and essays produced by Joseph Addison and the members of his social milieu.
The corpus is fully described in `Questions of standardization and representativeness in the development of social networks based corpora: the story of the Network of Eighteenth-century English Texts´. (In J.C. Beal, K. Corrigan, H. Moisl (eds.) 2007 Creating and Digitizing Unconventional Corpora. Volume 2: Diachronic Corpora. London: Palgrave.)
Fitzmaurice's research using the NEET corpus also utilizes social networks analysis, rhetoric and discourse communities to explore the roles of social ties and discourse practices in influencing language use among the central figures whose writings form the basis of the NEET corpus.
Fitzmaurice welcomes research students who are interested in the English language and the histories of English varieties, and who wish to pursue study in historical sociolinguistics, historical corpus linguistics, historical pragmatics, historical discourse analysis, and the history of the English language.
email : Susan Fitzmaurice
Roel Vismans
Roel Vismans comes from Rotterdam, the Netherlands' second city. After studying English at the Free University of Amsterdam and Linguistics at the University of Manchester, he returned to the Free University in 1994 to obtain his doctorate in Dutch linguistics, with a dissertation on Dutch modal particles. This study was partly framed in the theory of Functional Grammar, developed in Amsterdam by Simon Dik and others, but also touched on theories of linguistic politeness.
In the past Roel has also carried out research into Dutch durative constructions; computer-assisted language learning; Dutch word order, accentuation and intonation;and the integration of language and culture in courses in Dutch as a foreign language. His current research is more sociolinguistic in nature, but still involves politeness in Dutch, more particularly the use of the second-person pronouns and their acquisition by students of Dutch as a foreign language.
Roel is interested in collaboration on comparative projects involving any of the aspects of Dutch mentioned above, but especially the use of forms of address. He also welcomes PhD applications on Dutch language and linguistics.
email : Roel Vismans
Joan Beal
Joan Beal's research interests are in two areas: the history of English in the Late Modern period (1700-1945) and dialect and identity in North of England, but she often works on the interface between them.
Her PhD, subsequently published as English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence's 'Grand Repository of the English Language' (Clarendon Press, 1999) analysed a pronouncing dictionary written by the Newcastle-born radical, Thomas Spence in 1775. This led her to consider the relationship between linguistic thought and radical politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the nature of linguistic change in the Later Modern period. She has also become interested in the nature of prescriptivism and the continuities and contrasts between prescriptive texts of the 18th century and those of the present day.
Joan was a co-investigator, on the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English, sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The end product of this project is a website http://www.ncl.ac.uk/necte incorporating a major corpus of Tyneside English speech with orthographic and phonetic transcriptions, tagging and sound-files. Joan's experience on this project led to an interest in corpus linguistics, especially looking at corpora of spoken data from regional varieties of English. Together with Karen Corrigan and Hermann Moisl, she edited the two-volume Creating and Digitizing Language Corpora (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Joan is currently writing 'An Introduction to Regional Englishes: Dialect Variation in England' for Edinburgh University Press.
email : Joan Beal
Neil Bermel
A native of New York, Bermel received his BA in Russian Studies from Yale University and completed his MA and PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote his doctoral dissertation, on the history of aspect as a grammatical category in Russian, under the supervision of Alan Timberlake, Johanna Nichols, and Gary Holland.
Bermel´s 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. He is particularly interested in the intersection between language usage and language regulation. Currently he is part of the "Chapters in Czech Grammar" project headquartered at the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which aims to describe Czech grammar based on corpus data. He maintains 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.
Bermel has held roles in the national Slavonic studies associations in the UK (BASEES) and the US (AATSEEL), as well as Czech studies internationally (IATC). He sits on the editorial boards of Slovo a slovesnost, Slovo a smysl, Heritage Language Journal and Bohemistyka. Along the way, he has led two projects for creating electronic resources for language teaching, in collaboration with the LeTS unit (with Ilona Koranova, Charles University, Prague) and CILASS (with Dagmar Divjak, Ludek Knittl, and Karolina Ziolo) at Sheffield, and has been involved in the local Czech and Slovak communities in the city.
email : Neil Bermel
Kristine Horner
Born and raised in the US with her mother´s family hailing from Berlin, Kristine
Horner received her PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a
dissertation focused on language politics in contemporary Luxembourg. She taught in the Department of English at the Université du Luxembourg (formerly the Centre Universitaire de Luxembourg) from 1998-2006. In 2006, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Max Kade Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she began researching Luxembourgish cultural heritage in the Upper Midwestern region of the US. Kristine was Lecturer in German and Sociolinguistics at the University of Leeds from 2007 until 2010, when she joined the Department of Germanic Studies in Sheffield.
Her research interests include cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, the mental status of rules, and individual differences in linguistic knowledge. She has published monographs on the semantics of case (Cognitive Semantics and the Polish Dative, Mouton de Gruyter, 1997) and the relationship between linguistics and other disciplines studying language (Language, Mind and Brain: Some Psychological and Neurological Constraints on Theories of Grammar, Edinburgh University Press/Georgetown University Press, 2004), an edited volume on cognitive linguistic approaches to language acquisition (with Wojciech Kubinski, Universitas, 2003), and numerous articles. She is the editor of Cognitive Linguistics, Vice President of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association and a member of the Governing Board of the International Cognitive Linguistics Association.
Kristine is Director of the Centre for Luxembourg Studies in Sheffield and
co-ordinator of the Worldwide Universities Network on Germanic Languages and
Migration (GLaM). At present, her research is mainly focused on the completion of two monographs: 1) language testing and citizenship in late modern
Luxembourg (Mouton de Gruyter) and 2) social approaches to multilingualism (Routledge, co-authored with Jean-Jacques Weber).
email : Kristine Horner
Dagmar Divjak
Dagmar Divjak obtained a PhD in Russian Linguistics from the KULeuven (Belgium) in 2004, then spent one year at the UNC at Chapel Hill (USA, 2004-2005) and one year at the University of Stockholm (Sweden, 2005-2006) as a postdoctoral fellow specializing in Slavic Comparative Linguistics. She joined the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies at the University of Sheffield (UK) in September 2006 as a Lecturer in Slavic Languages and Linguistics.
Dagmar is a cognitive linguist, interested in linguistic categorization and what linguistic categories reveal about conceptualization. She takes a data-driven approach to studying issues related to verb syntax and semantics in Russian, Polish and to a lesser extent Serbian. Her focus on verbs at the grammar-lexis interface has led her to explore complex events in Russian and Polish and to develop a corpus-driven methodology to structure and describe groups of near-synonymous verbs in Russian and she is currently finalizing a book on that topic. Her ongoing research looks at how the lexical meaning of the verb and the grammatical meaning of aspect interact in assigning aspect to complex event structures in Russian, Polish and Serbian.
Her interest in linguistic methodology has led her to combine corpus-driven and experimental techniques in my own research and to co-organize and co-teach masterclasses on corpus methodology (University of Chicago masterclass, UCSB bootcamp) and experimental linguistics (University of Sheffield masterclass). She has also co-edited (with Agata Kochańska) a volume on Slavic cognitive linguistics (2007, Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain, Mouton de Gruyter).
email : Dagmar Divjak
Gibson Ferguson
Gibson Ferguson is director of the MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, and currently supervises 5 Phd students. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh where he subsequently taught in then Department of Applied Linguistics and the Institute for Applied Language Studies before moving to Sheffield in 2000. His work experience spans a range of countries including Malawi, Zambia, Mozambique, Cuba, Spain. His most recent book - published with Edinburgh University Press, 2006 - is titled 'Language Planning and Education". He is currently involved in two research project -on language use and language learning in the Yemeni community in Sheffield, and an international collaborative project with colleagues from Spain on academic knowledge production and the use of English as a scientific lingua franca. In the School of English he is a member of the 'Language Learning and Acquisition' and the 'Language, society, history and identity' research clusters with a wide range of interests in language policy, sociolinguistics, second language learning and teaching, and professional discourses.
email : Gibson Ferguson
Valerie Hobbs
Valerie Hobbs completed a B.A. in English Literature before studying at the Summer Institute of Linguistics at the University of North Dakota and later completing an M.A. in Applied Linguistics/TESOL at Georgia State University. In 2007, she completed her doctoral research on English language teacher education at the University of Sheffield. Her dissertation examined the experiences of trainees on a short-term teacher training course as well as evaluated the short and long-term impact of the course on trainees' belief systems. Her research interests and publication areas include teacher cognition and teacher change, short-term teacher education, ethnographic/qualitative research (with Magdalena Kubanyiova, University of Birmingham), and reflective practice. She is also interested in second language writing and hopes to expand her research expertise in that area.
Valerie is currently collaborating with Ayumi Matsuo (School of English,University of Sheffield) and Mark Payne (School of Education, University of Sheffield) on a project investigating teachers' use of the target language in Japanese classes. She is also writing an article on the role of negativity in the formation of groups on education courses.
email : Valerie Hobbs
Meng Ji
Meng is completing her PhD research in Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics at Imperial College, London. Her PhD dissertation Phraseology and Style in Corpus-Based Translation Studies (forthcoming, Peter Lang International) makes an original contribution to the study of Chinese four-character expressions including idioms and collocations in literary translations. On a larger scale, her current research aims to develop an interdisciplinary approach to corpus-based Translation Studies or empirical literature, which integrates research methods adapted from textual statistics, quantitative sociolinguistics, computational stylometry, etc. Her work has been accepted for presentation in a number of international conferences which cover a dozen of countries, or for publication in established academic journals which focus primarily on empirical or quantitative textual studies. Upon the completion of her PhD study, Meng will continue her research on modern Chinese literature and corpus linguistics as a postdoctoral fellow at the White Rose East Asia Centre, University of Sheffield. Meng holds an MA in Hispanic Studies from University College London (2005) and a BA in Hispanic Philology from Beijing Foreign Studies University (2004).
email : Meng Ji
Andrew Linn
Andrew Linn studied English at Cambridge, where he also took an MPhil in General Linguistics and a PhD in the History of Linguistics. He has worked at Sheffield since 1997, and is currently Professor of the History of Linguistics.
Most of Andrew's publications deal with the standardisation and teaching of English and the Scandinavian languages from the late eighteenth century until the early twentieth century, and with the people involved in these enterprises. He is particularly interested in the Anglo-Scandinavian School in Linguistics, in which the "applied" branch of linguistics emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. Funded by a British Academy / Swedish Academy grant he has been working with the papers of J. A. Lundell (1851-1940) in Uppsala University Library. He was history of linguistics editor for the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics and is chair of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas.
Thanks to a Leverhulme Fellowship, Andrew is researching recent developments in language policy in Norway, a country with a long experience of language planning. A major policy issue in Norway right now is `the threat of English´, and developing a response to this is occupying governments across Scandinavia and beyond. He is editor of Transactions of the Philological Society, the oldest scholarly journal devoted to the general study of language and languages.
Andrew has research collaborations with the British Library and the Worldwide Universities Network, and welcomes further collaboration with potential students and other researchers in the areas of linguistic historiography, language policy and Anglo-Scandinavian comparative linguistics.
email : Andrew Linn
Anna Linthe
Anna Linthe came to the University of Sheffield in 2000 to study for a BA in German and Linguistics. She then completed a MA in Applied Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. She began a PhD in 2006 under the supervision of Dr Regina Weinert (title: "The function and distribution of the generic pronouns man and du in spoken German"). Working from a small corpus compiled from conversations recorded in Rostock, Dessau, Frankfurt and Passau, her research uses approaches taken from pragmatics and discourse analysis.
From September 2007-June 2008 Anna was involved in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and lecturing. Since June 2008 she has been employed full time at Cambridge University Press and is continuing with her PhD on a part-time basis.
email : Anna Linthe
Ayumi Matsuo
Ayumi Matsuo completed her BA in English Language and Linguistics at Kobe College in 1993 and her Ph.D in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut in 1998. Her doctoral thesis focused on the comparative syntax of English and Japanese. Between 1999 and 2004, she held a position as a scientific staff member at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Her research interest includes various aspects of Psycholinguistics; mainly, on First and Second Language Acquisition as well as Bilingualism. Currently, she is working on the acquisition of nonce verbs by Japanese toddlers (funded by ESRC), cognitive as well as linguistic developments In Japanese-English bilingual children (funded by British Academy and UK Sasakawa Foundation). She recently started her research on the PGCE Japanese teaching (funded by the School of Education, University of Sheffield). Her focus is on the acquisition of various languages including Dutch, English, German, Japanese and Polish.
Her current research collaborations include Professor Nigel Duffield, Dr Sonja Eisenbeiss (University of Essex), Dr Valerie Hobbs (School of English, University of Sheffield), Dr Sotaro Kita (University of Birmingham), Professor Michael Siegal (Department of Psychology, University of Sheffield), Professor Letitia Naigles (University of Connecticut) and Dr Mark Payne (School of Education, University of Sheffield).
email : Ayumi Matsuo
Emma Moore
Emma Moore discovered her interest in language whilst studying for a BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Manchester. She went on to complete an MA in English Language and Linguistics, followed by a PhD at Manchester. Her research field is Sociolinguistics. During her time as a PhD student, she studied at Stanford University, where she developed interests in `style´ and `social meaning´. As an understanding of social meaning requires ethnographic knowledge, Emma is particularly interested in sociolinguistic methodologies which combine quantitative and qualitative research methods. Her work is strongly interdisciplinary and draws upon the fields of linguistics, anthropology and sociology.
Emma´s work tends to focus upon syntactic and discoursal aspects of variation. Her published research on a high school in the north west of England demonstrates how adolescents use linguistic features to construct socially meaningful identities. Her recent work with Robert Podesva (Georgetown University) uses the same corpus to consider the social function of tag questions. This work examines how different groups of speakers `design´ their tags in socially meaningful ways using a combination of topic choice, discourse shape and phonetic and syntactic properties.
Emma is also interested in the community function of language, and is currently working on a Knowledge Transfer project on the Isles of Scilly. By combining ethnography with historical research, she hopes to demonstrate the identity-specific role language plays in this heterogeneous and fluid community.
email : Emma Moore
Richard Steadman-Jones
Richard Steadman-Jones read Classics at the University of Oxford and then completed an MPhil and PhD in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. His research field is the History of Linguistic Thought, and he has a particular interest in western analyses and representations of the languages of Europe´s colonies in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. His 2007 monograph, Colonialism and Grammatical Representation, examined the work of John Gilchrist (1759-1841), one of the earliest British writers to produce a thorough-going analysis of the `Hindustani´ language. The book examines various aspects of Gilchrist´s representations of the language, including his treatment of nominal and verbal morphology, his response to the Hindi-Urdu ergative, his understanding of the process of acquiring a second language, and his interest in etymology as a method of both historical and philosophical enquiry. Richard has also published a number of articles discussing the representation of Native American and African languages in the context of European colonisation.
He is currently working on the depiction of colonial languages and language-learning in the work of five British writers of the 1950s. His aim is to complement his work on the structural analysis of Indian languages with a study of the affective dimensions of language-learning, as depicted in both fictional and autobiographical narratives of the late colonial period. Richard welcomes PhD applications from researchers with an interest in the History of Linguistic Thought and, more particularly, in the politics and practice of colonial language study.
email : Richard Steadman-Jones
Rosemary Varley
Rosemary Varley is a member of the Cognitive Neuroscience research group in Human Communication Sciences. The aim of this group is to develop biologically plausible accounts of human cognition in the domains of speech and language. Her research is focused in two main areas: the role of language in thought and mechanisms of speech control. The language and thought research explores the capacity of people with severe aphasia to sustain forms of thinking that are claimed by some scientists to necessarily involve language. Domains that are under investigation include navigation, mathematics and inferential reasoning. Related research examines language processing through implicit methods, including artificial grammar learning and priming. The speech control research explores the role of associative learning rather than generative mechanisms in controlling speech. Investigations are undertaken with healthy speakers and speakers with apraxia of speech. The research has led to the development of a new intervention for apraxia and a major study, funded by The BUPA Foundation, is currently underway that explores the effectiveness of this intervention. Current research methodologies include explicit and implicit measures of language behaviour in healthy speakers and cognitive neuropsychological investigations of brain injured patients, functional brain imaging and transcranial magnetic stimulation.
email : Rosemary Varley
Gareth Walker
Gareth Walker completed a BA in English Literature and Linguistics at the University of York in 2000, an MA in Linguistics in 2001 and a PhD in 2004. Following that, he held research posititions at the University of York in the Department of Language and Linguistic Science and the Department of Sociology. He joined the University of Sheffield in 2006.
His published work to date combines techniques of conversation analysis (CA) and auditory and acoustic phonetics to explore the function of phonetic detail in the organization of naturally-occurring conversational interaction.
Research topics have included: turn-taking and turn construction/ continuation; the signalling of attitude and emotion in conversation; and interactions involving members of certain clinical populations. He has working links with staff in the Department of Human Communication Science at the University of Sheffield, and at the University of York, and is a member of the White Rose Language and Interaction Research Group.
email : Gareth Walker
Teresa Wigglesworth-Barker
Teresa is a first year postgraduate student interested in language planning and policy in the Russian Federation. More details to follow.
email : Teresa Wigglesworth-Barker
Regina Weinert
Regina Weinert holds an MA and PhD in Linguistics, both from the University of Edinburgh, where she also worked in the Department of German and in the Human Communication Research Centre (HCRC). She came to Sheffield in 1996.
Regina has been research active in both general linguistics and second language acquisition. She has examined syntactic development, formulaic language and discourse-pragmatic aspects of L2 German. Her main focus in recent years has been the syntax and discourse of (native) spoken language and implications of this research for linguistic theory, the nature of linguistic generalisations, language typology and first and second language acquisition. Her approach is functional, usage-oriented and corpus-based. Regina works on German and English word order, focusing constructions, complement, adverbial and relative clauses, deixis, pronouns and particles. Her current interests include the relationship between deixis and modality and between informational and personal uses of linguistic devices.
With the support of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, Regina was recently able to complete an individual and a collaborative research project on spoken language pragmatics, which brought together work from a research cluster in the Department of Germanic Studies (Natalie Braber, Robert Mayr, Andrea Milde, Torsten Müller, Jane Woodin). Regina is involved in disseminating research into spoken language in the wider community of language professionals, especially among foreign language teachers.
Regina is an experienced research supervisor and evaluator and welcomes PhD applications in the above areas. She also has expertise in a range of sociolinguistic topics relating to German.
email : Regina Weinert
Lucy Xia Zhao
Lucy Xia Zhao completed a BA in English and an MA in Intercultural Communication in China before she went to Cambridge to do an MPhil in Linguistics and Bilingual First language acquisition at the University of Cambridge. She then read for a PhD in Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition at the same university. Her current research interests are in generative syntax and language acquisition.
email : Lucy Zhao