Slavonic Languages and Linguistics

This cluster encompasses research on:

• Socio-linguistics, specifically language policy and change with particular reference to Slavonic languages
• Corpus linguistics, corpus-based quantitative linguistics, including the creation of small (parallel and trilingual) corpora and the development of new methods (Behavioral Profiling) to describe linguistic relations more accurately
• Usage-based linguistics, more specifically Cognitive Linguistics with particular reference to Slavonic languages
• The description of grammatical phenomena and the study of lexical semantic relations
• The description of grammatical phenomena, specifically competition between forms for a single grammatical ‘slot’, and how this variation can be studied and measured through corpora, questionnaires and tests
• The study of lexical semantic relations

Recent highlights of the cluster´s work include monographs on the Czech language policy and orthographic reform (Bermel 2007), and the use of statistical techniques to provide evidence of relations between language structures and predict the choice of one structure over another (Divjak 2010). Bermel’s Leverhulme Trust funded project is investigating how different ways of measuring usage and acceptability to language users can assist in an accurate description of grammatical phenomena.

Staff

• Neil Bermel
• Dagmar Divjak

Research students

• Teresa Wigglesworth-Baker
• Dario Lečić