Professor Jack Grieve PhD

Department of Linguistics and Communication
Professor of Corpus Linguistics

Contact details

Telephone: +44 (0)121 415 8805
Email: j.grieve@bham.ac.uk
Twitter: @JWGrieve

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

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

Grieve, J, Bartl, S, Fuoli, M, Grafmiller, J, Huang, W, Napolitano Jawerbaum, A, Murakami, A, Perlman, M, Roemling, D & Winter, B 2025, 'The sociolinguistic foundations of language modeling', Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, vol. 7, 1472411. https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2024.1472411

Roemling, D & Grieve, J 2024, 'Forensic Authorship Analysis' CREST Security Review, vol. 18, pp. 18-19. <https://crestresearch.ac.uk/comment/forensic-authorship-analysis/>

Huang, H, Grieve, J, Jiao, L & Cai, Z 2024, 'Geographic structure of Chinese dialects: a computational dialectometric approach', Linguistics, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 937-976. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0138

Baissa, B, Fuoli, M & Grieve, J 2024, 'The news values of fake news', Discourse and Communication, pp. 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241280489

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

Baissa, B, Fuoli, M & Grieve, J 2024, 'Veracity and register in fake news analysis', Linguistics Vanguard.

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

Preprint

Huang, W, Murakami, A & Grieve, J 2024 'ALMs: Authorial Language Models for Authorship Attribution' arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2401.12005

Grieve, J, Bartl, S, Fuoli, M, Grafmiller, J, Huang, W, Jawerbaum, A, Murakami, A, Perlman, M, Roemling, D & Winter, B 2024 'The Sociolinguistic Foundations of Language Modeling' arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2407.09241

View all publications in research portal