The Bristol Centre for Linguistics at the University of the West of England

News and Events

News featuring BCL staff

Kate Beeching has been elected President of the Association for French Language Studies, and invited to join the executive committee of the Association of University Professors and Heads of French. The AUPHF is particularly keen to have a representative from the new universities which have suffered most acutely from the decline in the numbers of students taking up degree courses in Modern Foreign Languages. Kate will represent both linguistics and the post-92 institutions on this committee. Richard Coates has been reappointed to the AHRC’s Peer Review College as a Linguistics member. Jo Angouri is to be a Visiting Scholar at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. She will then deliver an invited paper at "Intercultural Communication in the European Context", to be held at the Academy of International Studies (Wyzsza Szkola Studiow Miedzynarodowych) in Lodz, Poland, 6-8 June 2009, and be lead speaker at the "High-performing international teams"conference at the University of York, 17-18 September 2009. Jeanine Treffers-Daller is lead editor for a special issue of the Journal for French Language Studies (CUP) to appear later this year, entitled “Knowledge and Use of the Lexicon in French as a Second Language”.

Forthcoming Events

The Philological Society will hold its "roving" meeting at UWE in Autumn 2010.

The British Association for Applied Linguistics will hold its annual conference at UWE in 2011.

Conferences, workshops, symposia

The first three-day conference on Meaning and Interaction (i-Mean), organized by Jo Angouri and Kate Beeching, was held at UWE on 23-25 April 2009.

Find out more from i-Mean@uwe web site...

A one-day workshop in the AHRC-funded series "A sense of place in Anglo-Saxon England" (PI: Richard Jones, Leicester) took place at UWE on 26 August 2009, locally hosted by Richard Coates.

The International Corpus Linguistics Research Unit (ICLRU) hosted by the BCL has just completed the work of archiving sets of parallel corpora in English and French, German and Spanish and of learner language data. These corpora provide an excellent resource for research projects on translation and second language acquisition.

Jeanette Sakel and Jeanine Treffers-Daller organized a three-day international workshop entitled “Interdisciplinary approaches to transfer, crosslinguistic influence and contact-induced change” at UWE Bristol on 9-11 July. At the workshop, 27 specialists from Europe, the US and Asia gave papers on a wide range of aspects of linguistic transfer from different perspectives (Second Language Acquisition, Bilingualism and Psychology). The workshop was sponsored by the BCL, the ESRC Centre for Bilingualism in Theory and Practice at Bangor (of which Jeanine is now a Research Associate), and the Research Committee of the Department of LLAS. There were three papers with authors from the BCL. The organizers intend to publish a volume with papers from the workshop.

Kate Beeching was an invited speaker at the Aston Corpus Symposium, 22-23 May. She gave two talks, one to the main conference entitled “Corpus approaches to sociolinguistic variation and semantic change” and another for the postgraduate workshop entitled “And your point is…? Subtext and a corpus approach to interactional pragmatics.” Richard Coates was an invited speaker (“A strictly Millian approach to proper naming”) at the interdisciplinary workshop on “Names” organized by the journal Mind and Language and the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College London on 12 June. Jonathan Charteris-Black has been a keynote speaker in June at the Patient Education Workshop, Ålborg, Denmark, and at the Second Qualitative Research Summer School, Dublin City University, and in July at the “Critical Approaches to Discourse Across Disciplines” conference, University of Hertfordshire. Jeanine Treffers-Daller was an invited speaker at the Ghent Workshop on Bilingualism (18-20 September 2008), and Richard Coates at the workshop “Names and Identities” in Oslo (21 November 2008). .

Public lectures

The formal inauguration of the Bristol Centre for Linguistics took place on 17 December 2008, centred around a guest lecture by Professor Peter Trudgill entitled "Why do he speak like that?: third-person-singular zero, East Anglian dialects, and the Spanish Inquisition".

Research Seminars

Meetings take place on Wednesdays at 13.30 in room 4E13a, Frenchay campus, University of the West of England, unless stated otherwise. Please bring lunch if you wish. Please also forward this message to anyone inside or outside UWE that you think might be interested. - Richard Coates, Director (Richard.Coates@uwe.ac.uk)

7 Oct Kate Beeching (UWE) Historical semantic change: evidence from “false friends”

21 Oct Felicity Meakins (Manchester) Case morphology in contact in an Australian mixed language

28 Oct Jonathan Charteris-Black (UWE) A feminine discourse of illness: transformation and modality

4 Nov Jeanette Sakel (UWE) Overgeneralization due to contact with Spanish, an analysis of language use in historical documents of Mosetén

18 Nov Stavroula Varella (Chichester) Language contact and figurative language

2 Dec Jeff Bowers (Bristol) “Grandmother cells”: how word (and object) knowledge might be coded in the brain

In Spring and Summer terms, we are expecting presentations from:

Peter Rawlings (UWE), George Broderick (Mannheim), Susan Hughes (UWE), Julia Sallabank (SOAS), Gertrud Reershemius (Aston), Keith Briggs (BT, Martlesham), Melanie Green (Sussex) and Nils Langer (Bristol).