Research news: September 2016-January 2017



As usual, we are starting the new term with a round-up of what we have all been doing when not in the classroom with our lovely students.

Charlotte Taylor was on research leave in the autumn term starting a new project investigating the representation of migrants over time. She spent the term as a visiting researcher at Lancaster University working on a wonderful archive of nineteenth century newspapers. In September she co-organised a panel on comparative approaches to migration discourse at the conference for Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines (CADAAD) and co-presented a paper on Evaluation of communities in migration discourse. From her other research area of pragmatics, in October her new book was published Mock Politeness in English and Italian: A corpus-assisted metalanguage analysis. She also published a research paper on Mock politeness and culture: Perceptions and practice in the journal Intercultural Pragmatics (November) and gave an invited paper at Edge Hill University on Mock politeness: Perceptions vs practice (October).
In the spring term, Roberta Piazza will be on research leave working on a monograph investigating the discourse that reflects and constructs the relation between identity and space in mobile and marginal individuals. She presented some of her work on this topic at the Sixth Conference on Explorations in Ethnography, Language and Communication: Diversities in global societies in Stockholm (September) with a paper on Diverse mobile geographies: The impact of unsettled place on individuals’ identity. In this area, she has also been awarded a HEIF grant to for an impact event to sensitise Brighton and Hove citizens about Irish travellers’ rights. Together with Charlotte Taylor, she organised the excellent symposium on Discourse: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (November) where she presented a paper on Corbyn by the BBC. The symposium is now leading to a special issue of CADAAD Journal.

Lynne Murphy was on research leave in the autumn term continuing work on her new book on British and American English. While on leave, she made a research trip to the Oxford University Press archives as part of her 'British and American Dictionary Cultures' grant project (January). She has also talked about the relationship between British/American English in her usual blog, Separated by a Common Language, and she featured on The Verb (BBC Radio 3) in November, talking about American and British election words. The segment then featured in Radio 4's Pick of the Week. She has continued her work of bringing the wonder of linguistics to a wider audience. In a very busy October, this included an article in Quartz on Linguistics explains why Trump sounds racist when he says “the” African Americans, an interview on KCBS talk radio San Francisco about  Donald Trump’s ‘othering’ language, and discussing Trump’s use of language on Talk the Talk (RTR FM, Australia).




Postgraduate research students

Many congratulations to: Alexandra Reynolds (co-supervised by Jules Winchester & Roberta Piazza) and Rukayah AlHedayani (supervised by Lynne Murphy) who were awarded their PhDs at the winter graduation!

New faces on campus

We are pleased to welcome two visiting researchers to Sussex this term. We still have Prof. Gerlinde Mautner with us and she will be sharing her research on ‘UK Supreme Court Judgements: A corpus-based genre analysis’ on 22 February as part of ROLLS.
We also welcome Shuyun Huang from Huaiyin Normal University in Jiangsu Province, China. She will be spending the spring term with us, working with Charlotte Taylor & Roberta Piazza to develop her research project on ‘A critical discourse analysis of the reported speech in disaster news’.

Comments