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

RAE

Contextual information

Since the previous RAE, the Linguistics team at UWE have strategically developed an inclusive research environment and an international capability, resulting in a strong Linguistics section comparable to that of other UK institutions. In 2006, the University took the decision to strengthen Linguistics further by appointing two Professors of Linguistics (Coates and Charteris-Black), in the same round promoting one Reader to Professor (Treffers-Daller) and one PL to Reader (Beeching). The increasing momentum in Linguistics research has been reflected by the establishment of the Bristol Centre for Linguistics in 2007, the creation of a further SL post in 2007 (Sakel), and the making of two Visiting appointments to the Centre: Oliver Padel as Visiting Professor and Patrick Hanks as Senior Visiting Research Fellow. Their attraction to the Centre testifies to, and enhances, the Centre's reputation in philology/onomastics and in semantics/lexicology respectively.

Over the census period, the team have written 5 monographs, edited 10 books or journal volumes, written 67 articles in international, refereed journals and 33 chapters in books, not to mention other, more local, writings. They have also been invited to give 32 lectures or seminars, and given 92 papers at conferences, on three continents, and hosted a wide range of large-scale international conferences and workshops at UWE and elsewhere.

The appointment of Coates, whose main research strengths are in lexicology in general and onomastics in particular, strengthens the group’s existing focus on vocabulary (Daller) and on contact-induced language change (Treffers-Daller), and adds a new historical perspective to the work of the team. Charteris-Black’s use of language corpora, as well as his interest in metaphor, ideology and rhetoric, fits well with the corpus-based approach and the social and cultural orientation of the researchers working in Language Variation and Stylistics (Beeching) and in Bilingualism (Daller and Treffers-Daller). Sakel’s trajectory as a young researcher working on the typology of Amerindian languages, contact and change ensures continuity between older and younger generations of researchers at UWE.

During the past few years, the number of PhD students has risen from 2 to 10 (with two completions already in this RAE cycle) and the number of MA students in October 2007 stands at well over 100. It is expected that the MA in English Language, which started in September 07, will boost recruitment to the team’s buoyant PhD programme, for which the team obtained ESRC recognition (2007).