Our research in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics covers areas including figurative language, idioms, embodied cognition, language and perception, sign language, gesture, second language acquisition and construction grammar.
Our current research projects are designed to ensure that the work we conduct has a significant impact on the lives of people outside academia. We are, for example, working on the role played by metaphor and other types of figurative language in advertising, the ways in which it is understood by people from different cultures, the use of metaphor by people who have experienced pregnancy loss or stillbirth and those who support them.
Research supervisors
Senior Lecturer in Psycholinguistics
- Idioms and figurative language
- Formulaic language
- The mental lexicon
- Second language learning/acquisition
- Language impairment
Professor of English Language and Applied Linguistics
- Metaphor
- Metonymy
- Cognitive Linguistic approaches to second language acquisition
- The use of figurative language by learners of English
Associate Professor in Historical Linguistics
Head of Education for the School of EDACS
- Historical linguistics and language change
- Construction grammar and the relationship between form and meaning
- Information packaging constructions and other specialised linguistic patterns
Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics
Deputy Director of the Centre for Corpus Research
- Construction grammar, cognitive linguistics
- Quantitative corpus linguistics
- Grammar, semantics, argument structure
- Language change
Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics
Acting Director of PGR for ELAL
- Iconicity in speech and gesture
- Language evolution
- Metaphor and cognitive linguistics
- Psycholinguistics
Professor of Linguistics
- British/Australian Sign Language
- Sign language linguistics
- Sociolinguistic variation and change
- Gesture studies
Lecturer in TESOL
- TESOL related issues
- Bilingualism
- Multilingualism
- Interference, language mixing phenomena (e.g. perceived incorrectness caused by other language influence in the language produced by bi- or multilinguals), code-switching
- First language attrition
Associate Professor in Cognitive Linguistics
- Cognitive linguistics
- Sound symbolism
- Language evolution
- Gesture
- Politeness