Amalia Arvaniti(intonation, speech rhythm, prosody, sociophonetics, Greek) – Amalia’s research focuses on the cross-linguistic study of prosody, particularly of speech rhythm and intonation. Additional interests include sociophonetics, the interaction of intonation with other components of the grammar, and bilingualism. The main languages in which she is currently pursuing research include English, Greek, Korean, Polish and Romani.
Laura Bailey(formal syntax, comparative syntax, English dialects, non-standard syntax, Latin) – Laura works primarily on formal and comparative syntax. She has worked extensively on polar interrogatives, and this touches on the semantics of polar questions, the syntax of disjunction and the relation between the two. These topics are driving her current research interests, which include work on grammaticalisation, word order, and disjunction in questions in English, Latin and cross-linguistically. She is also interested in collecting data to provide a formal analysis of non-standard constructions in English, including English dialects, and is currently investigating a new construction found mainly in ‘internet language’.
Gloria Chamorro(second language acquisition, bilingualism, first language attrition, TESOL) – Gloria’s research interests include second language acquisition, bilingualism and first language attrition, especially in relation to the processing of syntactic structures, such as anaphoric dependencies. She is also interested in second/foreign language teaching methodology.
Heidi Colthup(stylistics, narratology, creative writing) – Heidi is interested in narrative in video games and electronic literature, Postmodern and Digimodern literature, cognitive narratology, social media, and contemporary culture within the digital humanities.
Sam D’Elia(syntax, psycholinguistics) – Sam is interested in the syntax of Argument Structure, and in how we refer to events within the constraints of a grammar. He is particularly interested in how this is related to the way that humans process perceptual information.
David Hornsby(the history of French; sociolinguistics of French; English dialects, sociolinguistic theory) – David researches into the regional and sociolinguistic variation in France. His work has contributed to the understanding of koinéization, dialect levelling and linguistic obsolescence processes in Northern France. He is also interested in dialects of British English.
Michael Hughes(TESOL, methods of second language acquisition) – Michael Hughes has had a long career in English language teaching and assessment. His research interests include the efficacy of teaching training programmes for English Language teachers and the student experience of Higher Education, particularly that of international students. He has written articles and reviews for specialist and professional publications including the ‘Journal of English for Academic Purposes’, ‘Modern English Teacher’ and ‘Practical English Teaching’.
Vikki Janke(syntax, language acquisition, clinical linguistics, psycholinguistics) – Vikki’s research has a strong focus on the syntactic theory. Studying language acquisition in typical and atypical populations, she is interested in the acquisition of floating quantifiers, particles and double-complement constructions, all of which bear on the question of VP-structure above. Within atypical populations, she is compiling a developmental profile of control in autism, with a view to gaining a better understanding of aspects of complex grammar in this population. A current psycholinguistics project focuses on the lexical representation of cognates in L2-learners and native speakers of English.
Eleni Kapogianni(pragmatics, discourse analysis, intercultural pragmatics, experimental pragmatics) – Eleni’s main research lies in the areas of pragmatics, discourse analysis, and their various interfaces. She is particularly interested in nonliteral language in discourse, especially verbal irony and parody. Her key questions concern the scope and cross-cultural characteristics of irony, the interaction between irony, sarcasm, and (im)politeness in different discourse settings, and the factors that influence the strength of inferential meaning.
Christina Kim(experimental syntax, semantics-pragmatics interface, language processing, discourse structure, structural priming) – Christina is interested in how language interpretation and use is situated in context. She approaches these questions from a processing perspective, using methodologies from experimental psychology and cognitive science to investigate how aspects of semantic and pragmatic meaning are resolved online. She is also interested in the relationship of syntactic phenomena to discourse structure, and the division of labor between grammatical and processing constraints.
Angelos Lengeris(phonetics, second-language learning, TEFL/TESOL) – Angelos has investigated the use of new technologies for improving English perception and pronunciation for Greek learners of English. He has also studied the learning of second-language intonation, the acoustics of vowels in different speaking styles, the phonetics and phonology of Greek dialects, and the perception of stress.
April McMahon(language change, historical linguistics, language evolution) – April’s research interests include how and why languages change; the use of computational methods to group languages into families; the evolution of language in humans; and the history of varieties of English and Scots.
Tamara Rathcke(intonational phonology, rhythm and timing, language-music links, language variation and change, speech perception) – Tamara’s research focuses on different aspects of prosody of spoken language. She has a particular interest in exploring prosodic links between melodies of language and music. She is also involved in research projects investigating phonetic bases of language variation and change and cross-dialectal speech perception and processing.
Jeremy Scott(stylistics, narratology, literary linguistics, language and literature, creative writing) – Jeremy researches on the border between language and literary studies. His current research interests are in language and narrative, fictional technique, literary representations of dialect, the relationship between narratives and identity, stylistics-based approaches to creative writing, and portrayals of Englishness in fiction. He has published on contemporary British and Irish fiction, on travel literature, and also his own creative work.
