Bristol Centre for Linguistics seminar series and events
Seminar series
The Bristol Centre for Linguistics (BCL) runs a series of research seminars throughout the year. All seminars are free to attend.
Winter Seminar Series 2020-21
The seminars will be held online on Wednesdays, 13:00-14:00.
The fear of the slipper slope: Conscious suppression of
modality in family language policy.
Date: 11 November
2020
Speakers: Dr Annelies Kusters and Professor Jemina Napier
(Heriot-Watt University)
Football, sexuality, and /s/: A sociophonetic study of
/s/ realisations and the intersection of gender, sexuality, and
sport.
Date: 18 November 2020
Speaker: Dr Salina Cuddy (University of Sheffield)
Teenagers say the darnedest things: Social class and
linguistic discrimination in Dublin secondary
schools.
Date: 25 November 2020
Speaker: Dr Stephen Lucek
Title to be confirmed
Date: 13 January 2021
Speaker: Professor Ana Deumert (University of Cape Town)
For further details, or to be added to the mailing list for information about future events organised by the Bristol Centre for Linguistics, contact Dr James Murphy, Acting Director of BCL.
Past seminars
Seminar Series 2019-20
Why everything you thought you knew about language is
wrong
Date: 25 March 2020
Speaker: Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool)
Applying linguistics to sport: Putting language use in
professional rugby teams under the microscope
Date: 4 March 2020
Speaker: Kieran File (University of Warwick)
The multilingual origins of Standard
English
Date: 12 February 2020
Speaker: Laura Wright (University of Cambridge)
Paragogic consonants: A phonological puzzle in Norman
French
Date: 29 January 2020
Speaker: Richard Coates (UWE Bristol)
Language learning practices with Learning by Developing
and OIL in
Higher Education in Finland
Date: 22 January 2020
Speaker: Kristina Henriksson (Laurea University, Finland)
Modality, iconicity and the evolution of
language
Date: 16 October 2019
Speaker: Hannah Little (UWE Bristol)
Present day sound change in the dialects of
Worcestershire and Herefordshire
Date: 30 October 2019
Speaker: Esther Asprey (Open University)
Ethnolinguistic identity construction and Gaelic
language revitalisation in Nova Scotia, Canada
Date:
6 November 2019
Speaker: Stuart Dunmore (Edinburgh University)
Gender, language and parliamentary
participation
Date: 20 November 2019
Speaker: Sylvia Shaw (Westminster University)
Teenagers say the darnedest things: Social class
and linguistic discrimination in Dublin secondary
schools
Date: 4 December 2019
Speaker: Stephen Lucek
Seminar Series 2018-19
Features of the English spoken on the Isle of
Man
Date: 7 November 2018
Speaker: Andrew Booth
Code-switching: Cognitive
perspectives
Date: 21 November 2018
Speaker: Jeanine Treffers-Daller (University of Reading)
Mock (im)politeness
Date: 5 December 2018
Speaker: Charlotte Taylor (University of Sussex)
Connecting our worlds to our words: Influence of gender
nonconformity on pronoun comprehension
Date: 12
December 2018
Speaker: Lauren Ackerman (Newcastle University)
Naming Shirehampton and the name
Shirehampton
Date: 6 February 2019
Speaker: Richard Coates (UWE Bristol)
Ethics, morals and principles in language and gender
research: Working with toxic communities in online
spaces
Date: 20 February 2019
Speaker: Rob Lawson (Birmingham City University)
Language and neoliberalism in higher
education
Date: 20 March 2019
Speaker: Helen Sauntson (York St John University)
Sentence production in Australian free word order
languages
Date: 3 April 2019
Speaker: Evan Kidd (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen)
Seminar Series 2017-18
Subverting otherness and challenging ignorance: The
interactive construction of discursive identity in a transgender
youth group
Date: 18 October 2017
Speaker: Lucy Jones (University of Nottingham)
Developing understanding of different perspectives in
language and false-belief tasks: Evidence from German, English and
Mandarin
Date: 1 November 2017
Speaker: Silke Brandt (University of Lancaster)
Extended uses of names: From paragons to
analogies
Date: 22 November 2017
Speaker: Anu Koskela (De Montfort University)
'Forgiveness' as an unforgiving act: Exploring the
interplay of image and text
Date: 6 December
2017
Speaker: Laura Kilby (Sheffield Hallam University)
Public discourses on multilingualism in the UK: Benefits of using a
mixed method approach to study discourse
Date: 7
February 2018
Speaker: Sylvia Jaworska (University of Reading)
Location: Room 2S611
Technical language and semantic shift in Middle
English
Date: 21 February 2018
Speaker: Harry Parkin (University of Westminster)
Location: Room 2S611
The Gersum Project: Classification and analysis of
Norse-derived terms in Middle English
Date 7 March
2018
Speaker: Sara Pons-Sanz (University of Cardiff)
I want hold Postman Pat – An investigation into the source(s) of
grammatical errors in children’s language
Date: 11
April 2018
Speaker: Minna Kirjavainen-Morgan (UWE Bristol)
Seminar series 2016-17
Morphosyntactic features in South American
languages
Date: 12 October 2016
Speaker: Joshua Birchall
Social salience discriminates learnability of contextual
cues in an artificial language
Date: 19 October
2016
Speaker: Peter Racz (University of Bristol)
Phonological awareness and word reading acquisition in
Acehnese-Indonesian bilingual context
Date: 26
October 2016
Speaker: Septhia Irnanda (UWE Bristol)
Performing a Welsh accent on Twitter: How, but also,
why?
Date: 2 November 2016
Speaker: Mercedes Durham (Cardiff University)
Impersonal morphology and verb
classes
Date: 23 November 2016
Speaker: Laura Arman (University of Manchester)
The interference of orthography in the pronunciation and
phonological awareness of Italian learners of
English
Date: 8 February 2017
Speaker: Paulo Mariano (University of Warwick)
Phonetic transfer during language contact: The
mid-vowels of Occitan-French bilinguals
Date: 22
February 2017
Speaker: Damien Mooney (University of Bristol)
Seminar Series 2015-16
“Sounds Bristolian”: Generational shifts and
geographical diffusion
Date: 21 October 2015
Speaker: Kate Beeching/Emily Robinson/James Murphy/Richard Coates
(UWE Bristol)
Refusals to apologise and using apologies to
refuse
Date: 28 October 2015
Speaker: James Murphy (UWE Bristol)
Contact in Papapana
Date: 11 November
2015
Speaker: Ellen Smith (University College London)
William Gladstone as Linguist
Date: 18
November 2015
Speaker: Geoffrey Sampson (University of Sussex)
Seminar Series 2014-15
Geography, Literature, Onomastics: The rural and
suburban history of Sunnyside
Date: 15 October
2014
Speaker: Laura Wright (University of Cambridge)
West Midlands English dialect revealed by tax
returns
Date: 22 October 2014
Speaker: Harry Parkin (UWE Bristol)
Variation in lower-class writing: 19th century patient
letters from southern Germany
Date: 5 November
2014
Speaker: Markus Schiegg (University of Bristol)
Some more aspects of the Pragmatic Theory of
Properhood
Date: 12 November 2014
Speaker: Richard Coates (UWE Bristol)
Analysing the accounts of people affected by
dementia
Date: 28 January 2015
Speaker: Rik Cheston (UWE Bristol)
Political apologies in non-monologic
settings
Date: 4 February 2015
Speaker: James Murphy (UWE Bristol)
Speech therapy and child language
development
Date: 11 February 2015
Speaker: Sue Roulstone (UWE Bristol)
Patterns of thanking in UK service
calls
Date: 25 February 2015
Speaker: Maj-Britt Mosegaard-Hansen (University of Manchester)
Formulaic language, language processing and
interpersonal communication
Date: 4 March 2015
Speaker: Alison Wray (University of Cardiff)
Grammar checking in English and
Spanish
Date: 11 March 2015
Speaker: Rubén Chacón-Beltrán (University of
Madrid)
The Spoken British National Corpus 2014
Project
Date: 25 March 2015
Speaker: Tony McEnery (Lancaster
University)
Seminar Series 2013-14
European language policy: A legal
perspective
Date: 16 October 2013
Speaker: Vit Dovalil (Prague and
Freiburg)
Metaphor in psychotherapy: Implications for utterance
interpretation
Date: 13 November 2013
Speaker: Isabelle Needham-Didsbury (University
College London)
Caveats for contact linguistics from Cappadocian
Greek
Date: 4 December 2013
Speaker: Petros Karatsareas (UWE
Bristol)
'Making sculptures out of smoke': Using narrative and
creative writing to develop students'
reflexivity
Date: 11 December 2013
Speaker: Catherine Rosenberg (UWE
Bristol)
The role of Anglo-Norman in the history of English:
shift-induced contact influence?
Date: 5 February
2014
Speaker: Richard Ingham (Birmingham
City)
Where are the limits of the name? Some remaining issues
with The Pragmatic Theory of Properhood
Date: 5 March
2014
Speaker: Richard Coates (UWE Bristol)
Creole in local newspapers
Date: 19 March
2014
Speaker: Julie Blake (University of
Bristol)
Metaphor, agency and chronic pain
Date: 26
March 2014
Speaker: Jonathan Charteris-Black (UWE
Bristol) –
Abstract
Past conferences
Discourse markers, fillers and filled pauses: Psycho- and sociolinguistic perspectives, 24-25 June 2020
This workshop, held at UWE Bristol. brought together scholars
working on so-called 'fillers' and filled pauses from
psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic backgrounds. The last 25
to 30 years has seen an explosion of research and publications
on discourse and pragmatic markers, and the development of the
Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change network. Less work has
been done to integrate psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic, or
indeed multimodal, approaches to these phenomena, though many
publications acknowledge the speech processing functions of fillers
and filled pauses. These are the interdisciplinary gaps which the
current workshop addressed, in the hope to start a dialogue
between scholars with different perspectives on these
difficult-to-define items and to investigate their constructions
and collostructions in spontaneous speech in English and other
languages.
Invited plenary speakers were:
- Professor Martin Corley, University of Edinburgh
- Professor Gunnel Tottie, University of Zurich
We invited abstracts which addressed these questions and which provided empirical evidence in relation to:
- the status of discourse markers, fillers and filled pauses
- descriptive studies of filled pause collostructions
- sociolinguistic aspects of fillers and filled pauses
- child and second language acquisition of fillers
- the role of paralinguistic features in collostructions with discourse markers, fillers and filled pauses
- bilingual filled pause collostructions in contact situations.
iMean 6 (2019)
iMean 5 (2017)
The iMean 5 conference was held from 6 to 8 April 2017 at UWE Bristol's Exhibition and Conference Centre (ECC). This conference maintained its traditional focus on meaning in social interaction, with a thematic orientation to language and change.
Invited plenary speakers were:
- Gisle Andersen, NHH Norwegian School of Economics
- Christine Béal, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3
- Jenny Cheshire, Queen Mary, University of London
- Michael Haugh, University of Queensland
- Barbara Johnstone, Carnegie Mellon University
- Zuraidah Mohd Don, University of Malaya
We considered changes at the linguistic level but also how changes at a societal level affect linguistic usage and our conceptions and analysis of it. Our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving world has led to an upsurge in mobility and to the possibility of greater variation and change in language use. The linguistically diverse nature of contemporary societies has implications for social justice, with potentially differential access to the public sphere.
Different contexts of use and new media may also bring new styles and manners of expression. As society changes, so must our conceptual and epistemological models and old questions and concepts require new approaches and angles.
i-Mean 4 (2015)
i-Mean 3 (2013)
The conference aimed to explore whether and to what extent bringing together different methodological and theoretical approaches can:
- Enhance understanding of identity attribution in interaction.
- Lead to theoretically robust methodological innovation.
Exploring how speakers use language to claim an identity has been explored but also challenged in the various traditions (ranging from mainstream sociolinguistic theory to linguistic anthropology). In the broadly defined field of sociolinguistics, there are many conceptualisations of 'identity'. Through language, we actively construct and negotiate our self and social identities. It is through language that we index, directly and indirectly, who we are, how we wish to be perceived and where we (want to) belong. We see identity as (not exclusively but to a large extent) a linguistic phenomenon, dynamic and constantly evolving.
i-Mean 2 (2011)
The conference addressed the relationship between context and meaning, how context may be defined, how meaning is interpreted in context, how speakers create and negotiate context in interaction, and how context is dealt with in different research traditions. We seek to explore ways in which researchers can fruitfully work across methodological and disciplinary boundaries. Particularly in the (broadly defined) field of discourse analysis, there are widely recognised approaches which are often associated with specific methodological tools.
The conference aimed to explore whether and to what extent bringing together different methodological and theoretical approaches can:
- Enhance understanding of meaning in interaction.
- Capture the contextual information which speakers draw upon dynamically in interaction.
- Lead to theoretically robust methodological innovation.
Papers were invited from researchers working across different linguistic fields and traditions, focusing on any aspect of meaning and context.
i-Mean 1 (2009)
The conference aimed to disseminate cutting edge, multi-disciplinary research in the area of meaning in interaction. It was unique in bringing together scholars working on meaning in interaction and others working on the impact of interaction on language structure. The two constituencies share an interest in the manner in which meaning is co-constructed and negotiated between interactants, thus leading to a form/function reconfiguration. The complexities of the interpretation of meaning can be more acute in intercultural encounters.
The conference thus extended its scope to include the relatively new sub-discipline of intercultural pragmatics. It was timely in reflecting a rising interest across a number of fields in issues in interpreting meaning. The conference hosted two colloquia on Workplace Discourse and Meaning in Diachrony.
Download and view the conference proceedings.
Keynote speakers:
- Professor Janet Holmes (Victoria University of Wellington, NZ)
- Professor Elizabeth Traugott (Stanford University, USA)
- Dr Helen Spencer-Oatey (University of Warwick)
- Dr Véronique Traverso (Université de Lyon)
i-Mean 1 was supported by: