Professor Jack Grieve PhD
My research focuses on understanding language variation and change through the quantitative analysis of large corpora of natural language data.
- PhD in Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University (2009)
- MA in Linguistics, Simon Fraser University (2005)
- BA in Linguistics, Simon Fraser University (2002)
I am from Vancouver and studied at Simon Fraser University and Northern Arizona University. Before moving to the University of Birmingham in 2017, I held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Leuven and a Lecturership in Forensic Linguistics at Aston University.
I have taught modules on corpus linguistics, English grammar, forensic linguistics, and sociolinguistics.
I have supervised PhD students working on a range of topics, including corpus linguistics, dialectology, forensic linguistics, and sociolinguistics. I welcome applications from students working in any of these areas.
Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.
My main research interests are in corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, and dialectology. I am especially interested in grammatical and lexical variation in the English language across time, space and communicative context. I also develop methods for quantitative linguistic analysis and authorship attribution.
I consult on casework as a forensic linguist and I am on the editorial boards of the open access journal Frontiers in Digital Humanities and the open access book series Language Variation published by Language Science Press.
Recent publications
Book
Grieve, J & Woodfield, H 2023, The Language of Fake News. Elements in Forensic Linguistics, Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009349161
Article
Morin, C & Grieve, J 2024, 'The semantics, sociolinguistics, and origins of double modals in American English: New insights from social media', PLoS ONE, vol. 19, no. 1, e0295799. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0295799
Ilbury, C, Grieve, J & Hall, D 2024, 'Using social media to infer the diffusion of an urban contact dialect: A case study of Multicultural London English', Journal of Sociolinguistics. https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12653
Woodin, G, Winter, B, Littlemore, J, Perlman, M & Grieve, J 2023, 'Large-scale patterns of number use in spoken and written English', Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0082
Grieve, J 2023, 'Register variation explains stylometric authorship analysis', Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, vol. 0, no. 0. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2022-0040
Grieve, J 2022, 'Situational diversity and linguistic complexity', Linguistics Vanguard, vol. 0, no. 0, 9. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0070
Chiang, E, Nguyen, D, Towler, A, Hass, M & Grieve, J 2021, 'Linguistic analysis of suspected child sexual offenders’ interactions in a dark web image exchange chatroom', International Journal of Speech Language and the Law, vol. 27, no. 2, pp. 129-161. https://doi.org/10.1558/ijsll.41446
Grieve, J 2021, 'Observation, experimentation, and replication in linguistics', Linguistics, vol. 59, no. 5, pp. 1343-1356. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0094
Grieve, J, Emily, C, Clarke, I, Gideon, H, Heini, A, Nini, A & Waibel, E 2019, 'Attributing the Bixby Letter using n-gram tracing', Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 493–512. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqy042
Grieve, J, Montgomery, C, Nini, A, Murakami, A & Guo, D 2019, 'Mapping lexical dialect variation in British English using Twitter', Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2, 11. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2019.00011
Clarke, I & Grieve, J 2019, 'Stylistic variation on the Donald Trump Twitter account: a linguistic analysis of tweets posted between 2009 and 2018', PLoS ONE, vol. 14, no. 9, e0222062. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0222062
Chaeyoon, K, Reddy, S, Stanford, J, Wyschogrod, E & Grieve, J 2018, 'Bring on the crowd! Using online audio crowdsourcing for large-scale New England dialectology and acoustic sociophonetics', American Speech, pp. 1-38. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-7251252
Grieve, J, Nini, A & Guo, D 2018, 'Mapping lexical innovation on American social media', Journal of English Linguistics, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 293-319. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424218793191
Grieve, J, Nini, A & Guo, D 2017, 'Analyzing lexical emergence in American English online', English Language & Linguistics, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 99-127. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674316000113
Chapter (peer-reviewed)
Groom, N & Grieve, J 2019, The evolution of a legal genre: Rhetorical moves in British patent specifications, 1711 to 1860. in T Fanego & P Rodríguez-Puente (eds), Corpus-based research on variation in English legal discourse. vol. 91, John Benjamins Publishing, pp. 201-234. https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.91.09gro
View all publications in research portal