PhD Supervision Interests

I would be happy to receive applications in any of these areas: cognitive-typological linguistic theory (especially construction grammar and the usage-based model), language change and the history of English, dialect grammar, as well as the arsenal of research methods used in all these areas of linguistics.

Research Interests

My research mainly falls into three "strands" (where I use scare quotes to signal that these strands aren't completely separate but overlap to quite a large extent):

• Cognitive-typological linguistic theory and methodology. I am interested in investigating the scope and limits of the cognitive-typological view of language (especially grammar and semantics, which on this view are very much intertwined), and its associated methodologies (prominently including corpus linguistics). I'm a board member of the UK Cognitive Linguistics Association.
• Language change and the history of English. I have an active research interest in mechanisms of change, both language-internal (roughly speaking, grammaticalisation) and external (social factors). My research focuses especially on change in English, but that's not so much because of any special interest in this language -- instead, it's mainly because of the excellent availability of historical data.
• Dialect grammar, particularly of Lancashire dialect. I'm interested in dialect grammar, and do research especially on Lancashire dialect. I don't describe the dialect just for the sake of it -- rather, I try to demonstrate how non-standard language data may, and should, be used to inform linguistic theory at large (which over the course of the history of the discipline has been somewhat preoccupied with standard varieties), including its research methods. Conversely, I also show that traditional dialectology and sociolinguistics may benefit from a stronger interface with advances in (cognitive-typological) theoretical linguistics. This places some of my research within the area of "cognitive sociolinguistics" that has recently been emerging at the interface of these two fields.  

In addition to these areas, I also have an active interest in forensic linguistics -- especially the study of linguistic cues to deception. In this relation I am particularly interested in the possibility that current theories, which have often been suggested by psychologists, might be refined from a theoretical linguistic point of view. 

Papers, chapters, reviews, and my PhD thesis can be downloaded here:

Papers in refereed journals:

• 2013a. Hollmann, Willem B. Nouns and verbs in Cognitive Grammar: where is the 'sound' evidence? Cognitive Linguistics 24:275-308.
• 2013b. Ponsford, Dan, Willem B. Hollmann, and Anna Siewierska. Sources of BET. Functions of Language 21:90-124.
• 2012. Hollmann, Willem B. Word classes: Towards a more comprehensive usage-based account. Studies in Language 36:671-698 [Special issue on Theory and data in cognitive linguistics, eds. Nikolas Gisborne and Willem B. Hollmann].
• 2011. Hollmann, Willem B. and Anna Siewierska. The status of frequency, schemas, and identity in Cognitive Sociolinguistics: A case study on definite article reduction. Cognitive Linguistics 22:25-54.
• 2007a. Hollmann, Willem B. From language-specific constraints to implicational universals: a cognitive-typological view of the dative alternation. Functions of Language 14:57-78 [Special issue on ditransitives, eds. Anna Siewierska and Willem B. Hollmann].
• 2007b. Hollmann, Willem B. and Anna Siewierska. A construction grammar account of possessive constructions in Lancashire dialect: some advantages and challenges. English Language and Linguistics 11:407-424.
• 2007c. Broccias, Cristiano and Willem B. Hollmann. Do we need summary and sequential scanning in (Cognitive) grammar? Cognitive Linguistics 18:487-522. [Figures to be downloaded separately here.]
• 2006. Hollmann, Willem B. and Anna Siewierska. Corpora and (the need for) other methods in a study of Lancashire dialect. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54:203-216.

Chapters in edited volumes:

• 2013. Hollmann, Willem B. Constructions in cognitive sociolinguistics. In Thomas Hoffmann and Graeme Trousdale (eds.), The Oxford handbook of construction grammar, 491-509. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2010. Croft, William, Johanna Barddal, Willem B. Hollmann, Violeta Sotirova, and Chiaki Taoka. Revising Talmy's typological classification of complex events. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive construction grammar, 201-236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• 2009a. Willem B. Semantic change. In Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill, and Tony McEnery (eds.), English language: description, variation and context, 301-313. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• 2009b. Hollmann, Willem B. Grammatical change. In Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill, and Tony McEnery (eds.), English language: description, variation and context, 314-333. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• 2007. Siewierska, Anna and Willem B. Hollmann. Ditransitive clauses in English with special reference to Lancashire dialect. In Mike Hannay and Gerard J. Steen (eds.), Structural-functional studies in English grammar, 83-102. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
• 2006. Hollmann, Willem B. Passivisability of English periphrastic causatives. In Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch (eds.), Corpora in cognitive linguistics: corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis, 193-223. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
• 2004. Hollmann, Willem B. The iconicity of complementation in Present-day English causatives. In Constantino Maeder, Olga Fischer,and William J. Herlofsky (eds.), Outside-in - inside-out. Iconicity in language and literature Vol. 4, 287-306. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

PhD thesis:

• 2003. Hollmann, Willem B. Synchrony and diachrony of English periphrastic causatives: a cognitive perspective. Ph.D. dissertation. Manchester: University of Manchester.

Other:

• I reviewed 5 books on language change, grammar, and variation in the English language for the Times Higher Education textbook guide 22 May 2008. The books were Aarts, Bas (2007) Syntactic gradience: the nature of grammatical indeterminacy; Britain, David, ed. (2007) Language in the British isles; Carnie, Andrew (2007) Constituent structure; Denison, David & Richard M. Hogg, eds. (2006) A history of the English language; Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva (2007) The genesis of grammar: a reconstruction. The reviews can be downloaded here.

Current Teaching

I convene the following undergraduate and postgraduate modules:

• LING 103 Linguistics
• LING 203 English Sounds and Structures (term 1, in which we focus on grammar)
• LING 305 Topics in Linguistic Theory (term 1, in which we focus on cognitive semantics and grammar)
• LING 313 Language Change in English and Beyond
• LING 315 Forensic Linguistics
• LING 490 English Grammar

In addition, I also run modules on English grammar for our Hong Kong and MA in English Language by Distance programmes.

PhD students (current)

I currently supervise or co-supervise 8 PhD students: Nadia AlOrainy, Caterina Guardamagna, Yueyuan Li, Noor Malihah, Masatoshi Matsumura, Soyoon Park, Dan Ponsford, and Vittorio Tantucci.

PhD students (completed)

• Monira Al-Mohizea (lectureship at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)
• Efrosini Deligianni (lectureship at the University of New South Wales, Australia)
• Claire Dembry (language research manager, Cambridge University Press)
• Steve Disney (senior lectureship at University College Plymouth)
• Costas Gabrielatos (senior lectureship at Edge Hill University)
• Marvin Hulin Ren (professorship at North China Electric Power University, Beijing, China)
• Jianming Wu (lectureship at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China)

External Roles

Educational linguistics

I am very active in relation to language/linguistics and education/pedagogy. On the national level, I'm a member of the LAGB's Education Committee, the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLIE), and the UK Linguistics Olympiad committee (UKLO).

I am one of the reviewers of the QTS Literacy Skills Tests (taken by everyone wishing to obtain a place on a government funded teacher training course in England) for the Department for Education. In addition, I contribute to the evaluation of literacy tests for adults in further education, as part of a new (2013-  ) project run by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

• Lancashire dialect

  01/04/2006 →
  In this project I aim to investigate what makes the Lancashire dialect distinct from other dialects in the UK. While dialectologists have traditionally concerned themselves almost exclusively with acc ... Read more»

• Willem Hollmann gives talk on word classes at SCL25 in Reykjavik

  14/05/2013
  Willem Hollmann will be presenting a paper entitled 'Word classes in English and Dutch: listening to phonological evidence' in the workshop on 'Morphosyntactic variation and change in Germanic', which ... Read more»

• 25th Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics

  (Participant) 13/5/2013 → 15/5/2013
  Activity: Participation in workshop, seminar, course
  Read more»