Professor Jack Grieve PhD

Professor Jack Grieve

Department of English Language and Linguistics
Professor of Corpus Linguistics

Contact details

Telephone
+44 (0)121 415 8805
Email
j.grieve@bham.ac.uk
Twitter
@JWGrieve
View my research portal
Address
Frankland Building
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

My research focuses on understanding language variation and change through the quantitative analysis of large corpora of natural language data.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Applied Linguistics, Northern Arizona University (2009)
  • MA in Linguistics, Simon Fraser University (2005)
  • BA in Linguistics, Simon Fraser University (2002)

Biography

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.

Teaching

I have taught modules on corpus linguistics, English grammar, forensic linguistics, and sociolinguistics.

Postgraduate supervision

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.

Research

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.

Other activities

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.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

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

Nini, A, Corradini, C, Guo, D & Grieve, J 2017, 'The application of growth curve modeling for the analysis of diachronic corpora', Language Dynamics and Change, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 102-125. https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00701001, https://doi.org/10.1163/22105832-00701001

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

Grieve, J, Ruette, T, Speelman, D & Geeraerts, D 2017, Social functional linguistic variation in conversational Dutch. in E Friginal (ed.), Studies in Corpus-based Sociolinguistics. Routledge.

Conference contribution

Clarke, I & Grieve, J 2017, Dimensions of Abusive Language on Twitter. in Proceedings of the First Workshop on Abusive Language Online. Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL, Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Canada, 30/07/17. <http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-3001>

View all publications in research portal