My main research efforts are centred in historical pragmatics, which seeks to apply the theories of pragmatics to historical texts and language change. As the culmination to half a dozen or so published pilot studies, I am currently completing a monograph Early Modern English dialogues: Spoken interaction as writing (with Prof. Merja Kytö, Uppsala University ) (to be submitted to CUP's English Language Series). This book aims at investigating historical 'spoken' face-to-face interaction, as recorded in speech-related material (e.g. trial proceedings). It is based on a large corpus of historical dialogues which I developed with Prof. Merja Kytö (see details below). Topic areas include: pragmatic markers, interjections, lexical repetitions, certain grammatical aspects (e.g. the conjunction 'and'), and certain sociolinguistic areas (e.g. gender).

Within present-day pragmatics, I have a particular research interest in linguistic politeness, focusing on the social dynamics of interaction. My work has concentrated on the opposite of politeness: impoliteness. My article Towards an Anatomy of Impoliteness (Journal of Pragmatics, 1996) outlines a framework for analyzing highly confrontational interaction. I have writtenfour follow-up articles (one in collaboration with Derek Bousfield and Anne Wichmann), which test and extend my original framework.I am currently immersed in a three-year ESRC Fellowship, which aims at pushing forward this research (see project link to the right).

I also have an active interest in cross-cultural pragmatics. I am a co-applicant on the ESRC funded project: The 'Mirabeau Project/Projet Mirabeau' - pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic factors in communication between language assistants and teachers in France and England . This project, involving the collaboration and financial support of the French Ministère de l'Education Nationale and The British Council, is investigating the character of communication between student foreign language assistants and teachers/administrative supervisors in schools in France and England

Stylistics

My particular interest here has been cognitive stylistics, one of the most distinctive and most recent developments in stylistics, combining insights from linguistics and cognitive psychology. My research in this area has culminated in Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and other Texts (2001), a book which attempts to describe how readers understand characters in fictional texts. The main focus of this book on play-texts (particularly Shakespeare) reflects another research interest in stylistics: the language of drama. I have co-edited (with Mick Short and Peter Verdonk) a collection of papers on the language of drama, Studying Drama: From Text to Context (1998). More recently, I have co-edited (with Elena Semino) a collection, Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis (2002), which was designed to define the field of cognitive stylistics.

As for my present and future work in stylistics, I am now concentrating my efforts on what might be called corpus stylistics, an emerging field combining corpus linguistics (and computational linguistics) with stylistics. I am particularly interested in the notion of 'keywords', and have written a paper applying that concept to Romeo and Juliet . I am preparing a book Approaches to Corpus Stylistics (working title; to be published by Routledge) with David Hoover ( New York University ), Bill Louw ( University of Zimbabwe ) and Martin Wynne (Oxford Text Archive).

History of English

I have published numerous papers in the area of historical corpus linguistics. Corpus Linguistics has had a dramatic impact on the nature of historical language studies in the 1990s. Many corpora of historical texts have been constructed, but these have focussed on literary or scholarly texts, which is a peculiar situation given the acknowledged importance of spoken interaction in language change. With grants from the British Academy and the AHRB, I have collaborated in the construction of a million-word corpus of speech-related Early Modern English texts (with Prof. Merja Kytö). Currently the corpus stands at approximately 1.2 million words, and contains the following text-types (drawn with reliable sources): trial proceedings, witness depositions, play-texts, dialogue in prose fiction, didactic dialogues (including language teaching textbooks). The target is to release this corpus generally to the academic community in 2005. This corpus is the basis of the monograph on Early Modern English dialogues referred to above.

Recently, I produced the second edition of my textbook History of English (2 nd edn., 2005). The first edition was successful, so Routledge tells me. However, I am much happier with the second edition. Here I am deeply indebted to all those around the world who took the trouble to provide feedback on the first edition.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Pragmatics (particularly involving sociopragmatics, politeness theory, speech act theory, corpus-based pragmatics)
History of English (specifically Early Modern English) (particularly involving historical pragmatics, historical sociolinguistics, historical corpus linguistics)
Stylistics (particularly involving the stylistics of drama, corpus stylistics)

Publications

Books

Authored books

(in prep.) The Pragmatics of the English Language (contact with Palgrave)

(in prep.) Approaches to Corpus Stylistics (with D. Hoover, M. Wynne and B. Louw) (contract with Routledge) [N.B. I have completed my part of this book]

(submitted) Impoliteness: Using Language to Cause Offence (contract with Cambridge University Press)

(in press) Speech in Writing: Explorations in Early Modern English Dialogues. Cambridge University Press (with M. Kytö)

(2005) (2nd edn.) History of English, London: Routledge, 134pp.

(2001) Language and Characterisation: People in Plays and other Texts, (Longman) Pearson Education, 336pp. [Reviews x 3]

(1997) History of English, London: Routledge, 103pp.

Edited books

(in prep.) Language and Style in Shakespeare: New Insights (with Mireille Ravassat) (to be submitted to CUP in late 2009)

(submitted) Historical (Im)Politeness Research. Peter Lang (with D. Kádár)

(2009) English Language: Description, Variation and Context. Palgrave, 718pp. (with P. Kerswill, R. Wodak, F. Katamba and T. McEnery)

(2002) Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 333pp. (with E. Semino.)

(1998) Exploring the Language of Drama: From Text to Context, Routledge, 181pp. (with M. Short and P. Verdonk)

Edited journal special issues

(2008) Impoliteness, Special issue of the Journal of Politeness Research 4(2): 161-337(with D. Bousfield)

(2009) Historical Sociopragmatics, Special issue of the Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10(2): 153-287.

Articles

Journal articles

(submitted) The cross-cultural variation of impoliteness: A study of impoliteness events reported by studentsin England, China, Finland, Germany and Turkey, Language in Society (with Leyla Marti,Meilian Mei, Minna Nevala and Gila Schauer)

(submitted) Impoliteness: Convention and creativity, Journal of Pragmatics

(2009) Historical sociopragmatics: An introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics10(2):153-160.

(2009) Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare'sRomeo and Juliet. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(1): 29−59.

(2009) Identifying key sociophilological usage in plays and trial proceedings (1640-1760): An empirical approach via corpus annotation. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10(2): 260−283 (with Dawn Archer)

(2008) 'Activity types' and 'discourse types': Mediating 'advice' in interactions between foreign language assistants and their supervisors in schools in France and England, Multilingua 27: 297-324 (with R. Crawshaw and J. Harrison)

(2008) Impoliteness: Eclecticism and diaspora. An introduction to the special edition. Journal of Politeness Research 4(2): 161-168 (with D. Bousfield).

(2007) A new kind of dictionary for Shakespeare's plays: An immodest proposal, SEDERI (Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies), 17: 47-73.

(2005) 'Impoliteness and entertainment in the television quiz show: The Weakest Link', Journal of Politeness Research 1: 35-72.

(2003) 'Impoliteness revisited: With special reference to dynamic and prosodic aspects', Journal of Pragmatics 35: 1545-1579 (with D. Bousfield and A. Wichmann)

(2003) 'From "politically correct councillors" to "Blairite nonsense": Discourses of "political correctness" in three British newspapers', Discourse and Society 14 (1): 29-47 (with S. Johnson and S. Suhr)

(2000) 'An approach to characterisation: The case of Katherina in Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew"', Language and Literature 9 (4), 291-316

(2000) 'Data in historical pragmatics: Spoken interaction (re)cast as writing', Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (2), 175-199 (with M. Kytö)

(2000) 'Constructing witches and spells: Speech acts and activity types in Early Modern England', Journal of Historical Pragmatics 1 (1), 97-116 (with E. Semino)

(1997) 'Using a corpus to test a model of speech and thought presentation', Poetics, 17-43 (with E. Semino and M. Short)

(1996) 'The borrowing of Classical and Romance words into English: A study based on the electronic Oxford English Dictionary', International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 1.2, 199-218 (with P. Clapham)

(1996) 'Towards an anatomy of impoliteness', Journal of Pragmatics, 25, 349-67

(1996) 'Inferring character from text: attribution theory and foregrounding theory', Poetics, 23, 335-61

(1994) 'Why relevance theory does not explain "The relevance of reformulations"', Language and Literature, 3, 1, 43-8

Book chapters

(in prep.)'Politeness and impoliteness'. In: Karin Aijmer and Gisle Andersen, editors of Pragmatics of Society, a volume of Handbooks of Pragmatics edited by Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

(submitted) 'Historical sociopragmatics'. In: Andrea H. Jucker and Irma Taavistainen, editors of Historical Pragmatics, a volume of Handbooks of Pragmatics edited by Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H.Jucker and Klaus P. Schneider. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

(submitted) "It's not what he said, it's how he said it!": Prosody and impoliteness. In: members of the LPRG(eds.) Politeness Now. Mouton de Gruyter

(in press) 'Activity types and characterisation in dramatic discourse'. In: J. Eder, Fotis Jannidis and R. Schneider (eds.) Characters in Fictional Worlds: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (with D. McIntyre)

(2009) 'The history of English spelling'. In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Lingistics. Palgrave, 244-58 (with D. Archer)

(2009) 'Pragmatics'. In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Lingistics. Palgrave, 202-20 (with G. Schauer)

(2009) 'Politeness in interaction'. In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Lingistics. Palgrave, 523-35.

(2009) 'Standard English and standardization'. In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Lingistics. Palgrave, 223-243. (with P. Kerswill)

(2009) 'Studying the English Language'. In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Lingistics. Palgrave, 3-7 (with F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak).

(2009) 'Studying the English Language: Reflections'. In: J. Culpeper, F. Katamba , P. Kerswill, T. McEnery and R. Wodak (eds.) English Language and Lingistics. Palgrave, 659-666. (with Charles Alderson)

(2009) 'The Metalanguage of impoliteness: Explorations in the Oxford English Corpus'. In: P. Baker (ed.) Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. Continuum, pp. 64-86.

(2009) 'Love - 'a familiar of a devil'? An Exploration of Key Domains in Shakespeare's Comedies and Tragedies'. In: D. Archer (ed) What's in a word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 136-157. (with D. Archer and P. Rayson)

(2009) 'Reflections on a cognitive stylistic approach to characterisation'. In: J. Vandaele and G. Brône (eds.) Cognitive Poetics (Applications of Cognitive Linguistics Series). Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 125-159

(2008) 'Pragmatic annotation'. In: Kytö, M. and Lüdeling, A. (eds.) Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 613-42 (with D. Archer and M. Davies)

(2008) 'Requests and directness in Early Modern English trial proceedings and play-texts, 1640-1760'. In: A. H. Jucker and I. Taavitsainen (eds). Speech Acts in the History of English, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 45-84. (with Dawn Archer)

(2008) 'Reflections on impoliteness, relational work and power'. In D. Bousfield and M. Locher (eds.) Impoliteness in Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp.17-44.

(2006) 'Prologue from Bilgewater by Jane Gardham'. In: Goodman, S. and O'Halloran, K.A (eds.) The Art of English: Literary Creativity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 407-413. (with E. Semino and M. Short).

(2006) '"Good, good indeed, the best that ere I heard": Exploring lexical repetitions in the Corpus of English Dialogues, 1560-1760', in I. Taavitsainen, Juhani Härmä and Jarmo Korhonen (eds) Dialogic Language Use / Dimensions du dialogisme / Dialogischer Sprachgebrauch, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, Vol. 66. Helsinki, pp. 69-85 (with M. Kytö)

(2003) 'Sociopragmatic annotation: New directions and possibilities in historical corpus linguistics', in A. Wilson, P. Rayson and A. M. McEnery (eds.) Corpus Linguistics by the Lune: A Festschrift for Geoffrey Leech, Peter Lang: Frankfurt/Main, 37-58 (with D. Archer)

(2002) 'Computers, language and characterisation: An Analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet'. In: Ulla Melander-Marttala, Carin Ostman and Merja Kyto (eds.), Conversation in Life and in Literature: Papers from the ASLA Symposium, Association Suedoise de Linguistique Appliquee (ASLA), 15. Universitetstryckeriet: Uppsala, pp.11-30. (Also available at: http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/corpus_linguistics_links/papers_using_wordsmith.htm)

(2002) 'A cognitive stylistic approach to characterisation', in E. Semino and J. Culpeper (eds.) Cognitive Stylistics: Language and Cognition in Text Analysis, John Benjamins, 251-277

(2002) 'Lexical bundles in Early Modern English: A window into the speech-related language of the past', in Teresa Fanego, Belén Méndez-Naya and Elena Seoane (eds.) Sounds, Words, Texts, Change. Selected Papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (11 ICEHL), Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, John Benjamins, 45-63 (with Kytö, M.)

(2000) 'Gender voices in the spoken interaction of the past: A pilot study based on Early Modern English trial proceedings', in Dieter Kastovsky and Arthur Mettinger (eds.) The History of English in a Social Context, (Trends in Linguistics, 129), Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 53-89 (with Kytö, M.)

(2000) 'Language and Context(s): Jane Gardam's Bilgewater', in Bex, T., Burke, M., and Stockwell, P. (eds) Contextualized Stylistics, (Studies in Literature, 29), 131-151 (with Short, M. and Semino, E.)

(2000) 'The conjunction AND in Early Modern English: Frequencies and uses in speech-related writing and other texts', in Bermúdez-Otero, R., Denison, D., Hogg, R.M., and McCully, C.B. (eds.) Generative Theory and Corpus Studies: A Dialogue from 10ICEHL, (Topics in English Linguistics, 31), Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 299-326 (with Kytö, M.)

(1999) 'Modifying pragmatic force: Hedges in a corpus of Early Modern English dialogues', in Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft (eds.), Historical Dialogue Analysis, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 293-312 (with Kytö, M.)

(1999) 'Investigating non-standard language in a corpus of Early Modern English dialogues: Methodological considerations and problems', in Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta (eds.), Writing in Non-standard English, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 171-187 (with Kytö, M.)

(1998) '(Im)politeness in drama', in Culpeper, J., Short, M. and P.Verdonk (eds.) Studying Drama: From Text to Context, Routledge, 83-95

(1997) 'The Comparison of Adjectives in Recent British English', in Terttu Nevalainen and Leena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds.) To Explain the Present: Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen, Mémoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki, Vol. 52, pp. 353-373 (with Leech G.N.)

(1997) 'Towards a corpus of dialogues, 1550-1750'. In: Language in Time and Space. Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday (Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik - Beihefte 97), ed. by H. Ramisch and K. Wynne. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 60-73 (with Kytö, M.)

(1996) 'Using a corpus for stylistics research: speech presentation', in Thomas, J. and Short M. Using Corpora in Language Research, Longman, 110-31 (with Short, M. and Semino, E.)

(1995) 'Stylistics' in Blommaert, J., Östman, J.O. and Verschueren, J. (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics, John Benjamins, 513-20 (with Semino E.)

Encyclopedia entries

(2009) 'Historical pragmatics', 2,000 words for L. Cummings (ed.) The Pragmatics Encyclopedia.London: Routledge.

(2006) 'Drama: stylistic aspects', 10,000 words for C. Emmott, editor of 'Text Analysis and Stylistics', a volume of Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edn.) edited by K. Brown, Oxford: Elsevier, pp.772-784 (with D. McIntyre).

(2002) 'Language of Drama', 2,500 words for W. Frawley (ed.) Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(1995) 'English Language', 2,500 words for M. Wynne-Davies (ed.) Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature. London: Bloomsbury.

Associated Keywords: Corpus linguistics, Corpus stylistics, Historical and diachronic corpora, History of English, Politeness, Pragmatic theory, Shakespeare, Stylistics

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