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

Members

The Bristol Centre for Linguistics is a new research centre established at the University of the West of England in August 2007. The Centre’s work has a sharp empirical focus using corpus-based, quantitative, fieldwork and archival methodologies, and concentrates especially on:

• meaning in the broadest sense: semantics, pragmatics, lexicology, figurative language, etymology and historical onomastics;
• rhetoric, narrative, stylistics and stylometry;
• language contact, multilingualism, variation and change;
• second language acquisition, learner language (esp. lexis) and testing

We are very keen to welcome postgraduate research students who share our interests, whether part-time or full-time, and whether wishing to study in attendance or by distance-learning.

The 13 staff members of the Centre are:

Jo Angouri   BA MSc (Aristotle U.) PhD (Essex)
Language in the workplace, communicative activity in multicultural and multilingual contexts, intercultural communication; discourse analysis; language and identity, language for special purposes, stylistic variation, code-switching, attitudes towards language; research methodologies.

Carmen Arnáiz   BA MPhil PhD (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
Pragmatics and contemporary Spanish language; language and taboo, language and humour; translation studies.

Kate Beeching   BA (Surrey) MA (UCNW Bangor) PhD (Surrey/Paris X-Nanterre).
Spontaneous spoken French, the social and linguistic function of pragmatic expressions; corpus studies, parallel (translation) corpora; language change and sociolinguistics, stylistic and sociolinguistic variation, language and gender, politeness theory; learner language and pedagogical issues.

Prof. Jonathan Charteris-Black   BA RSACert PGCE (Bristol) RSADip MA (Surrey) PhD (Birmingham)
Corpus-based research; metaphor, figurative language, persuasive communication; cognitive linguistics, phraseology, vocabulary learning; language and gender.

Prof. Richard Coates (Director)  MA PhD (Cambridge) FSA FRSA
Historical linguistics and European philology; onomastics (especially place-naming in the British Isles and theory of naming); language contact; traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics; morphology; lexical semantics; Channel Islands French; interdisciplinary relations between linguistics, history and geography; local history; poetry and translation.

Michael Daller  MA (Wuppertal) PGCE (Amsterdam) PhD (Utrecht) DiplStat (Open U.)
Bilingualism, intercultural business communication, migration and multilingualism; vocabulary knowledge; quantitative methods; language testing.

Raquel Guirardello-Damian   BA MA (State U. Campinas) PhD (Rice U.)
Anthropological linguistics (especially South America, in particular Brazilian languages); endangered languages; linguistic fieldwork and language documentation; bilingualism; language contact; typology; morphosyntax; semantic-pragmatic aspects of Romance languages (in particular Portuguese). 

David Phelan   BA MEd DipTEFLA CTEFLA
English as a Foreign Language; assessment, student progress, learner autonomy.  

Prof. Sue Roulstone  PhD MEd CertMRCSLT
Speech and language impairment in children; speech and language therapy; linking mechanisms of deficit with intervention mechanisms. 

Jeanette Sakel   BA MA (Århus) PhD (Nijmegen and Max Planck Inst. for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig)
Language contact, bilingualism and sociolinguistics; immigrant languages; linguistic fieldwork and documentation (especially endangered languages and immigrant languages); Native American languages; in particular Pirahã (Muran), the Mosetenan languages Mosetén and Tsimane'/Chimane, and Greenlandic; typology; interdisciplinary relations between linguistics and human geography.

Prof. Jeanine Treffers-Daller   BA MA PhD (Amsterdam)
Contact-induced variation and change, bilingual language proficiency, code-switching, borrowing and conceptual transfer, vocabulary richness, lexical aspects of second language acquisition.

We also have three distinguished visiting staff:

Dr Keith Briggs (Visiting Fellow)   BSc (Adelaide) PhD (Melbourne)
Mathematics and statistics; place-name study and the creation of electronic resources for place-name study.

Prof. Patrick Hanks (Visiting Professor)   MA (Oxford) PhD (Brno)
Lexicography; corpus linguistics; precision and vagueness in language; mapping meaning onto use − corpus-based syntagmatic analysis of lexical regularities; similes and metaphors: creative and innovative use of language; personal names: origin and history of personal names, and convention and creativity in naming.

Prof. Oliver Padel (Visiting Professor)   MA LittD (Cambridge) FSA
Celtic philology, onomastics and literature, especially Cornish; medieval Cornish history; Arthurian literature.

For further details about the Centre and its activities, contact Richard Coates (Richard.Coates@uwe.ac.uk).