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

RAE

Outcome

Linguistics was one of the most successful units of assessment at the University of the West of England in RAE 2008. 10% of its outputs were rated with the maximum 4 stars (world-leading), 45% of its outputs were rated at 3 stars or above (internationally excellent), and 85% of is outputs at 2 stars or above. As a result, UWE has fully earned its place among British institutions as a credible presence in Linguistics, in 12th place out of 25 institutions in the Times Higher Education rankings, between Manchester, Lancaster and Cambridge on the one hand, and Leeds, Newcastle and Oxford on the other.

The Bristol Centre for Linguistics was established in August 2007 as this university’s focal point for research in linguistics and on the relation between linguistics and other disciplines. It was founded in acknowledgement of the success already achieved by UWE research units in these areas, and the research strengths of the current and newly-appointed staff. The Centre’s main research endeavours are empirical, using corpus-, text-, fieldwork- and archive-based methods, and the statistical analysis of real-language data.

Our three main research areas are:

(1) semantics in the most general sense, including pragmatics and rhetoric, metaphor, lexicology, applied linguistics with a lexical focus, and onomastics;

(2) contact linguistics (covering intercultural studies, the linguistics of threatened languages, second language acquisition, and applied and historical aspects of language contact);

(3) language variation and change and philology.

We have been busy establishing research networks in these areas, and reaching out to other researchers on language-related topics within and outside UWE, intending to expand the Centre as appropriate. 

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