Language Across Borders Research Group

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, language and the internationalisation of HE, 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.

Teaching and research

Corpus linguistic methodologies are integrated in undergraduate and postgraduate courses in lexicology, discourse analysis and linguistic workshops. We supervise postgraduate linguistic dissertations, at both MA and PhD level.

Our research interests cover a wide area of corpus linguistic work, and provide for doctoral supervision in a range of specialisms. Glenn Hadikin’s research is about phraseology and Lexical Priming in New Englishes/learner language and John Williams has extensive experience of using corpora in lexicography. Other members of staff have been involved in designing corpus interrogation software and building corpora. We have also been involved in knowledge transfer activities, such as the 'Using Corpora in Translation' webinar for eCPD