This year I will be teaching: the grammar part of LING 152 (with Maria Papastathi), LING 202, (in term 1), LING 313 (together with Willem Hollmann and Jonathan Culpeper), Ling 305 (in term 2). I will be also teaching on our Ph.D by Thesis and Coursework. In addition I will be supevising or co-supervising 12 Ph.D students.

Research Interests

I have been Professor of Linguistics and Human Communication in the department since 1994. Earlier I was a senior research fellow in the Department of General Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam, and prior to that a lecturer in the Department of English at Gdansk University ( Poland ). I have also taught in the Department of Linguistics at Monash University, Melbourne (Australia) where I completed my undergraduate studies and did my MA and Ph.D.

My major research interests are language typology, the comparison of different theoretical frameworks, diachronic change, discourse pragmatics and the morpho-syntax of English dialects. Recently I have also become interested in the affects of long standing wide-spread literacy on grammar. My typological work has centred on various aspects of clause structure, grammatical relations, case and agreement marking, word order, valency changing operations and pragmatic functions. Although I have done comparative work on a number of models of grammar, I am primarily interested in functional-cognitive models, and especially usage based approaches. My interest in English dialects is focused on Lancashire dialect which I am investigating together with Willem Hollmann. Our interest lies not solely in the description of the dialect but also in how dialectal data may be seen to bear on linguistic theory and the nature of the methods that are required to elicit different types of dialectal data. As for my more recent interest, i.e. in the affects of literacy on grammatical structure, I am investigating the issuefrom a number of perspectives, diachronic (with respect to various stages of the major standard European languages), dialectal (comparing standard and nonstandard varieties of the same language), and cross-linguistic (comparing languages with and without a written tradition).

In the early 90-ties I was the coordinator of the word order group of the European Science Foundation Eurotyp project dealing with the typology of the languages of Europe. More recently I have been involved in the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures project designed by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the EC- funded Linguistic Typology Resource Centre project based in Utrecht . The Atlas which has resulted from the WALS project was published last year and is available in both traditional book form and on CD-rom from OUP. It is a wonderful resource for both research and teaching and I recommend it highly. Over the last ten years I have developed in cooperation with Dik Bakker from the University of Amsterdam an extensive computerized database on pronominal systems, person agreement, case marking and word order. Information on person agreement and personal pronouns for well over 450 languages is now available here . I have presented some of the results of my analyses of the data in a monograph entitled Person published in 2004 by CUP in the red series (see comprehensive bibliography) . While I continue to be interested in person and person systems, I am also working on impersonal constuctions. One of the constructions that I have been working on, together with Maria Papastathi is the impersonal "they". We received a small grant from the British Academy " How impersonal can impersoanl pronouns get?" to explore this topic in the context of European languages. We are hoping to consider a broader range of langauges in the near future. Last year I edited a special issue of the Transactions of the Philological Society on impersonal constructions and together with Andrej Malchukov from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig I organised a workshop on impersonal constuctions at the 41st meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea in Forli. Currently we are eding a volume stemming from this workshop to be published by John Benjamins.My interest in impersonal constructions has also resulted in my re-visting a previous research topic, namely the passive. I have spent quite some time investigating the different sources of passive constrictions, especially the development of passives from 3pl impersonals and more recently the causative-passive diachronic pathway, particualrly in Sinitic and other South-East Asian langauges. My most recent presentations on the topic include: the keynote address atthe 17th International Conference of Chinese Linguistics in Paris in July entiteld. "Sinology meets canonical typology: the case of the passive", "Passive agents: prototypical vs. canonical passives" at the 8th meeting of the Association of Linguistic Typology in July in Berkeley, "Multiple passive constructions" at the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea in September in Lisbon.

On the 1st of September I embarked on a new project Referential Hierarchies in Morpho-Syntax www.rhim.uni-koeln.defunded by the ESF-Babel initative together with the AHRC. This is a three year collaborative project aimed at investigating aspects of syntax charcateristically found in endangered languages.We will be investigating morphosyntactic systems that are based on a hierarchy of referents -first and second person ranking over third, humans over non-humans, and known referents over unknown ones. My part of the project which I will be working on together with Eva van Lier (formerly from the University of Amsterdam) will be devoted to ditransitive constructions.

My full list of publications is available here. Many of them, including my 1984 book on the passive, are in PDF format and can be downloaded.

My professional activities have been quite varied. Since 1997 I have been a co-editor of the Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory series which now numbers 10 volumes. I am a founding member of the Association of Linguistic Typology (http://www.lancs.ac.uk/fss/organisations/alt/) and am the currentpresident of the association. I am on the board of various journals including Journal of Linguistics, Studies in Language, Functions of Language, Folia Linguistica, Beyond Philology, the Typology section of the Linguistic Compass and Jezikoslovlje. Between 1998 and 2001 I was the Honorary secretary of the Linguistic Association of Great Britain and have been twice a member of Council of the Philological Society. In 2002 I was President of the Societas Linguistica Europea. In the period 2000 -2004 I was a member of the ESRC Management, Psychology, Linguistics and Educational Research College. Between September 2006 and theend of 2008 I was a member of the Lanaguage and Linguistics panel of the AHRC and in 2010 will be a member of panel 4. In 2009 I was a member of the ERC Senior Reserach Award panel and will again be acting in this capacity in 2010. I regularly referee research projects for funding bodies and articles for various linguistic journals to which I also contribute as an author. In addition I usually attend three or four conferences a year. In September 2006 in September together with Willem Hollmann I organised Syntax of the World's Langauges 2, the follow up to the very successful first conference held in Leipzig in 2004. The subsequent Syntax of the World's langauges conference was held in Berlin in 2008 and the next one is to be held in Lyon in 2010. This year at the invitation of Professor Wang Kefei of Beijing Foreign Studies University, together with my husband Dik Bakker I visited China for the first time. I was very keen to learn more about Sinitic languages and also to propogate Linguistic Typology among Chinese linguists. In all we gave 14 lectures on various aspects of Linguistic Typology in Beijing, Xi'an and Shanghai.The vist proved to be a most rewarding experience.

At Lancaster University I have held various functions. Between 2005-2008 I was head of department. I have also been a member of the University Council, Court, the University Nominations Committee, the University Grievance Committee, The Faculty of Social Science Chairs and Readers Committee,the Departmental Coordinator of Postgradate Teaching, The Departmental Coordinator of Undergraduate Teaching.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I am very interested in supervising Ph.D level work in the areas of language variation and change. I am especially keen to supervise work in linguistic typology, dialect morpho-syntax, compartive studies of English and other languages especially in the areas of pronominal usage, voice, impersonal constuctions, word order, definiteness and tense and aspect. Another topic that I would like to work with doctoral students on is how wide-spread literacy affects grammar. Thisis a topic which may be considered form a diachronic perspective in relation to different historical satges of the the major standard European languages, or from a dialectal perspective or a cross-linguistic perspective, i.e. by means of comparing languages with and without a written tradition.

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Anna Siewierska has 58 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Siewierska, Anna (2010) From 3ptl-to passive: incipient, emergent and established passives. Diachronica: International Journal for Historical Linguistics, 27 (3). ISSN 0176-4225 (In Press)

Siewierska, Anna and Xu, Jiajin and Xiao, Richard (2009) Bang-le yi ge da mang (offered a big helping hand): A corpus study of the splittable compounds in spoken and written Chinese. Science Direct . (In Press)

Siewierska, Anna (2009) Person asymmetries in zero expression and grammatical function. Essais de Linguistique Generale et de Typologie Linguistique offerts au Professeur Denis Creissels à l'occasion de ses 65 ans. . pp. 425-438.

Siewierska, Anna (2009) Semantics. In: Culpeper, Jonathan and Katamba, Francis and Kerswill, Paul and Wodak, Ruth and McEnery , Anthony, (eds.) English Language, Description, Variation and Context. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills, Basingstoke, pp. 186-201. ISBN 9781403945907

Bakker, Dik and Siewierska, Anna (2009) Weighing the semantic distinctions in person forms. In: Helmbrecht, Johannes and Nishina, Yoko and Shin, Yong Min and Skopeteas, Stavros and Verhoeven, Elizabeth, (eds.) Form and function in language research : papers in honour of Christian Lehmann. Trends in Linguistics . Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 25-56. ISBN 9783110216127

Siewierska, Anna and Bakker, D. (2008) Case and alternative strategies : word order and agreement marking. In: Malchukov , Andrej and Spencer, Andrew M., (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Case. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0199206476

Siewierska, Anna (2008) INTRODUCTION: IMPERSONALIZATION FROM A SUBJECT-CENTRED VS. AGENT-CENTRED PERSPECTIVE. Transactions of the Philological Society, 106 (2). pp. 1-23.

Siewierska, Anna (2008) Impersonal Constructions in Grammatical Theory. Transactions of the Philological Society, 106 (2). Blackwell Publishing, London.

Siewierska, Anna (2008) Ways of impersonalizing. In: de los Angeles Gomex Gonzales, Maria and Mackenzie, Lachlan and Gonzalez Alvarez, Elsa, (eds.) Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 3-26.

Hollmann, Willem B. and Siewierska, Anna (2007) A construction grammar account of possessive constructions in Lancashire dialect : some advantages and challenges. English Language and Linguistics, 11 (2). pp. 407-424. ISSN (Print) 1360-6743 (Online) 1469-4379

Other Interests and Hobbies

I like reading, walking , listening to music and entertaining. I also like playing bridge but haven't managed to do so for quite a while.

Associated Keywords: Agency, Cognitive linguistics, Corpora of nonstandard languages, Dialectology, English, Historical and diachronic corpora, History of English, Impersonality, Language, Language change, Language typology, Language variation and change, Linguistic ethnography, Linguistics, Linguistic typology, Literacy, Second language acquisition, Semantics, Spoken language corpora, Syntax, Syntax/discourse interface

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