People

Staff Members

Panos Athanasopoulos works in the areas of experimental psycholinguistics, experimental cognitive linguistics, bilingual cognition, linguistic and cultural relativity, first, second and additional language learning.

Silke Brandt uses corpus analysis and experimental methods to investigate how children’s comprehension and productive use of specific (complex) linguistic structures is guided by the form and function of these and related structures in their input. She investigates interactions between cognitive skills, Theory of Mind and language processing.

Aina Casaponsa works in the areas of experimental psycholinguistics, multilingualism, and second language acquisition with a focus on cross-language interactions and underlying brain mechanisms

Francesca Citron (Psychology) investigates figurative language comprehension (metaphors, idioms) and emotion word processing, in native as well as second language speakers, with a specific focus on the timing and neural correlates of such processes.

Christopher Hart uses cognitive linguistic frameworks and experimental methods in critical discourse analysis to investigate the links between language, cognition and social and political action, with a focus on event-structure, metaphor, point of view and deixis.

Willem Hollmann works in the areas of cognitive-typological linguistic theory, language change and the history of English, and dialect grammar.

Veronika Koller works in the area of socio-cognitive critical discourse analysis with a focus on metaphor theory and collective identity in discourse.

Patrick Rebuschat works in the areas of second language learning, bilingual cognition, individual difference and explicit vs implicit learning.

Elena Semino works in the areas metaphor theory and analysis, cognitive stylistics and medical humanities/health communication.

Daniël Van Olmen works in cognitive/functional, typological, contrastive and historical linguistics investigating tense, mood and modality, pragmatic markers, indefinites, negation and argument structure in (West) Germanic, Standard Average European, and the worlds’ languages.

Vittorio Tantucci is interested in the relationship between cognition, pragmatics and historical phenomena of language change, such as grammaticalization, (inter-)subjectification, chunking, constructionalization and semasiology, in Mandarin Chinese, Sinitic systems and other world languages.

Current Research Students

• Shrouq al-Maghlouth
• Amal Albureikan
• Mahdi Almajdoa
• Jing Chen
• Shirley Cheung
• Angelica Fulga
• Melanie Harrison
• Sam Jones
• Siwei Lai
• Luisella Leonzini
• Jennifer Lowe
• Terry McDonough
• Nathan Murphy
• Cael Rooney
• Neil Walker
• Song Yun
• Shijie Zhang

Recently Completed Theses

• Monira Al-Mohizea – An investigation into the comprehension of formulaic sequences by Saudi EFL learners
• Daniel Alcarez-Carrion – Time gestures: Time conceptualisation in English with evidence from gestures in a multimodal corpus
• Nadia Aleraini – Investigating focus constructions in an EFL context: a usage-based approach
• Stella Bullo – Expressing evaluative attitude in advertising reception: a socio-cognitive study
• Efrosini Deligianni – Pragmatic factors that determine clausal constituent order in Greek: A diachronic perspective
• Claire Dembry – Lancashire dialect grammar: A corpus-based approach
• Steve Disney – Evidentiality and modality in English: The theory and practice of establishing evidential constructions in English
• Caterina Guardamagna – Cognitive-constructional approach to the development of Latin secundum NP 
• Yueyuan Li – Verb reduplication: A cross-linguistic survey with special focus on Mandarin Chinese
• Noor Malihah – Valency-changing constructions in the Javanese dialect of Kudus
• Soyoon Park – A study of there-constructions in English: an empirical approach to constructions
• Dan Ponsford – Bet proposal constructions: Structure, sources and discourse basis
• Jianming Wu – The function of pronominal expressions in Puxian
• Zhongyi Xu – Modality and evidentiality in political discourse: A cognitive-functional account
• Shuo Yu – Resultative Constructions in Mandarin Chinese from the Perspective of Construction Grammar: A Cognitive-Typological View