Centre for European and International Studies Research (CEISR)
Language Across Borders (LAB)
The structuralist legacy is a general acceptance of language as a bounded system that can be defined and learnt. Our research group is interested in studying what happens as speakers and writers cross the boundaries of language systems or transgress the rules within them, and what insights can be gained when linguists explore the contributions made by fields as diverse as semiotics, social theory, political theory, literary theory, psychology and neuroscience. We are, in short, interested in the breaking of barriers and the building of bridges. We see language as practice embedded in and shaped by socio-cultural factors.
Our focus is varied. We investigate language choices of bilingual families in diaspora, attitudes towards the spread of English as a lingua franca in globalisation, translation as creation, as gate-keeping and as bridge-building, language as ideology, language and the unconscious, language and the brain, languages and technologies, language policy and language rights in new political settings. In all our enquiries we are concerned to investigate language practices within their social and political contexts and to monitor and comment on change in an increasingly post-structuralist and post-national era.
Language Across Borders also encompasses research in corpus linguistics. Please click here to view more about corpus linguistics at the University of Portsmouth.
Contact: Carol O'Sullivan
Academic members:
- Margaret Clarke
- Tricia Coverdale-Jones
- Stephen Crabbe
- Erika Darics
- Jonathan Evans
- Glenn Hadikin
- Svetlana Kurtes
- Mario Saraceni
- Charlotte Taylor
- Mark Wyatt
- Lin Zheng
- Jöerg Zinken