Welcome to the Department of English Language and Linguistics
Laura is interested in formal analysis of non-standard syntax and is currently investigating the omission of prepositions in several varieties of English (including the Kentish dialect). She also maintains an interest in particles, questions, negation and disjunction. Her research is parametric and cross-linguistic in nature. Read Laura’s article on ‘untranslatable’ words.
Gloria’s main interest is first language attrition, but her research interests include second language acquisition and processing, and bilingualism across the lifespan, including bilingual education and its impact on children’s social and cognitive development.
Gloria is the project leader and coordinator of the English Hub for Refugees which she established in 2016 to help unaccompanied refugee minors gain the English language skills they need to integrate into their new communities and access mainstream education.
Heidi works in stylistics (the study and interpretation of texts): media, narrative, and creative writing. She was previously a lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University and taught on the Creative and Professional Writing degree programme.
Heidi teaches language and Writing in the Media, a module which enables students to create their own portfolio of journalism and media-related writing. Articles written by students on this module are available on Medium if you want to take a look!
Sam teaches on a wide range of subjects but his main research interests lie in the syntax of argument structure. He is interested in how we refer to events within the constraints of a grammar, and is particularly interested in how this is related to the way that humans process perceptual information.
Sam is also interested in how Language (yes with a capital ‘L’) can give insight as to how we, as humans, think – the language of thought.
David teaches in English Language and Linguistics and in French, and his work is focused around his research interests in language variation and change, including the shift from traditional dialect to urban regional French.
More recently, David’s attention has turned to stylistic variation and the phenomenon of variable liaison, which involves the pronunciation in some contexts of normally silent link consonants in French (e.g. trop (p) important), and its complex relationship to social factors.
Fieldwork for a recent project has taken him to East Kent, where contact between families who came from other UK coalfields in the 1920s has produced a uniquely ‘northern’ English dialect in the south-east.
Vicky’s work is in the areas of syntax, first language acquisition in typical development, syntactic and pragmatic development in individuals on the autism spectrum and second language acquisition in both spoken and signed languages.
Vikki’s research on language in autism has been sponsored by the British Academy and she is currently contributing to a three-year Leverhulme research grant entitled ‘Breaking into Sign Language: the role of input and individual differences’. Vikki is working with Gloria Chamorro on the impact of early bilingual education on children’s social and cognitive development.
Eleni is particularly interested in nonliteral language in discourse, especially verbal irony, parody/satire, and humour.
Key questions of her research concern the scope of irony, the interaction between irony, sarcasm, and politeness in different discourse settings, and the factors that influence the strength of inferential meaning.
Eleni also works on issues concerning intercultural communication, considering both universal and culture-specific characteristics of nonliteral language (irony and humour in particular). Additional interests include metaphor, lying, deception (especially in the language of politics), conflict/aggression and impoliteness.
Christina is s interested in how language interpretation and use is situated in context. She approaches these questions from a processing perspective, drawing on methodologies from experimental psychology and cognitive science.
Christina is Director of the newly-established Linguistics Laboratory, which has a range of professional-standard equipment to support research. She also teaches semantics, pragmatics, and quantitative research methods in linguistics.
Vita’s interests concern the acquisition of second language phonetics and phonology, especially so-called phonetic talent and the cognitive processes that underlie it. She is also interested in innovative language pedagogy such as content- and task-based learning and gamification of learning. She teaches modules on phonetics and phonology.
Tamara’s primary expertise is in phonetics and phonology, with a special focus on suprasegmental aspects (elements such as stress, tone and rhythm) of speech and language. Much of her research crosses disciplinary boundaries to psychology and music.
Find out more about her project: ‘Does language have groove?’
Jeremy’s teaching and research focuses on the border between language and literary studies. Jeremy teaches in the areas of literary stylistics, narrative and narratology, critical linguistic, literary and cultural theory, as well as creative writing.
Jeremy’s current research interests are in fictional technique, literary representations of dialect, the relationship between narratives and identity and stylistics-based approaches to creative writing and creativity in general.