Contact Details
Tel: +44 (0)1524 594644
Room: Bowland College, B100a
Office Hour: Tue 11-12
Dr Willem Hollmann
Lecturer in Linguistics
Degree: MA (Amsterdam), MA (Manchester), PhD (Manchester)
Associated research centres and groups: Language Variation and Change, Theoretical Linguistics - RITL, University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL)
Potential Doctoral Proposals
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 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).
- 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. With my colleague Anna Siewierska I'm involved in a project on the grammar of Lancashire dialect. We don't intend to describe the dialect just for the sake of it — rather, our project is driven by the view that 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, we also feel that traditional dialectology may benefit from a stronger interface with advances in (cognitive-typological) theoretical linguistics. Three papers we've written on these issues can be downloaded below.
In terms of PhD supervision, I would be happy to receive applications in any of these areas, i.e. 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. Currently I supervise (jointly with other colleagues in the Dept) 7 PhD students working in these areas: Claire Dembry, Steve Disney, Costas Gabrielatos, Masatoshi Matsumura, Monira Al-Mohizea, Marvin Hulin Ren, and Jianming Wu.
Papers, chapters, reviews, and my PhD thesis can be downloaded here:
Papers in refereed journals:
- 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:
- To appear a. Croft, William, Johanna Barddal, Willem B. Hollmann, Violeta Sotirova, Chiaki Taoka. Revising Talmy's typological classification of complex events. In Hans C. Boas (ed.), Contrastive construction grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- To appear b. Hollmann, Willem B. Semantic change. In Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill & Tony McEnery (eds.), The English Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
- To appear c. Hollmann, Willem B. Grammatical change. In Jonathan Culpeper, Francis Katamba, Paul Kerswill & Tony McEnery (eds.), The English Language. 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.
- 2005. Hollmann, Willem B. Passivisability of English periphrastic causatives. In Stefan Th. Gries & 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, & 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.
Teaching
I teach on LING 151 Introduction to General Linguistics, LING 203 English Sounds and Structures (both of which I convene together with Kevin Watson) and LING 313 Language Change in English and Beyond, which I convene but teach together with Jonathan Culpeper and Anna Siewierska. In term 2, I also convene LING 305 Topics in Linguistic Theory, in which we focus on Cognitive Linguistics. At postgraduate level I teach LING 490 English Grammar in term 1.
Administration
My main admin responsibilities are Director of Studies for our BA in English Language (Part II) and Visiting Scholars Coordinator. Last but by no means least, I'm a staff rep on the LAEL Society, our very active departmental students' society.
Associated Keywords: Cognitive linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Dialect, Dialectology, English grammar, English language, History of English, Language change, Language typology, Linguistics, Semantics, Sociolinguistics
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