Research News, February to August 2017, Part 1

This time round we're presenting our research round-up in two parts.  Here's what half our staff have been doing with their research time over the past few months.


Dr Aloufi with her supervisor and examiners
Lynne Cahill was on research leave in the spring term, working with a historian at the University of York on the language of medieval charters (legal documents). She is presenting this work at the Eleventh International Workshop on Written Language and Literacy in Nagoya, Japan at the end of August. Her paper "What are the Phonemes in Phoneme-Grapheme Mappings?" has been published in the Journal of Written Language and Literacy and she co-edited the Special Issue on Orthographic Databases and Lexicons. 

Many congratulations to Lynne C's student Aliaa Aloufi who completed her doctorate on The phonology of English loanwords in UHA (Urban Hijazi Arabic). Dr Aloufi graduated in July.




Lynne Murphy returned to teaching in the spring and has been presenting new research at conferences in the summer. At the Dictionary Society of North America in June she presented research based on her British Academy project, British and American Dictionary Cultures: "Language lovers or linguistic authorities? Contrasts in British and American dictionary cultures". With Sandra Jansen (University of Paderborn), she organised a panel the English Shared Futures conference in Newcastle: Tomorrow's English Today: Problems in predicting the linguistic future. Lynne's contribution addressed the question: "How American is the future?" Later in July, Lynne and Rachele De Felice (UCL) presented aspects of their work on thanking in British and American emails at the International Pragmatics Association conference in Belfast and at Corpus Linguistics 2017 in Birmingham. Lynne has also been talking about American English (and whether it threatens British English) on on the Radio 4 programmes Word of Mouth with Michael Rosen and Americanize! with Susie Dent. She's recently been quoted on politeness in British workplaces in BBC Capital, on Why British English is full of silly-sounding words in BBC Culture, on a British MP's usage of an American racial slur in the Atlantic, and on why Fears of British English's disappearing are overblown in the Economist.


Charlotte Taylor's article "The relationship between irony and sarcasm: Insights from a first-order metalanguage investigation" has been published in Journal of Politeness Research. She's also published a review article on "Pragmatics and Discourse" in The Year’s Work in English Studies (Oxford University Press) and a book review of S. Kirkwood, S. Goodman, C. McVittie & A. McKinlay (2016) The Language of Asylum: Refugees and Discourse in the journal Discourse & Communication. Charlotte has recently become a member of the editorial board for the new Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies published by Cardiff University Press.
Charlotte has given a number of papers in the last few months. She presented "Mock politeness: Perceptions vs practice" at the University of Reading in February, and in March "Apples and oranges? Comparing across multilingual corpora" at Corpus Linguistics in the South 14: Corpus Linguistics & Multilingualism at Birkbeck and Discourse keywords of migration: The case of community at the Language & Power Research Group in Canterbury. In April, Charlotte and Jiayi Wang (UCLan) presented "The conventionalisation of mock politeness in British & Chinese online forums" at the Imean Conference at the University of West England and in May she attended Approaches to migration, language and identity at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland to present "Naming and categorising: 200 years of labelling migrants in the British press".


Stay tuned for Part 2 in early September!


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