Research

Our research investigates language in use across a broad range of social domains and communicative activity-types. It falls within various sub-fields of text and discourse analysis, including:

  • Business and Corporate Communication – corporate identity and branding, legitimation in stakeholder documents
  • Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) – power and identity in discourse, language policy and language ideologies, representations of minority social groups and social movements, the discursive legitimation of discrimination
  • Ecolinguistics – representations of climate change, representations of animals
  • Forensic Linguistics – conflict and aggression in online discourse, language as evidence, legal document analysis
  • Health Communication – mental illness in fictional and non-fictional narratives, figurative language and chronic pain, metaphor and illness/end of life, stigmatisation in media discourses
  • Language, Gender and Sexuality – intersection of gender and sexuality with other identities, representation of those identity groups and language use by such identity groups
  • Pragmatics – politeness and impoliteness, historical pragmatics
  • Stylistics – metaphor and mind style in fiction

Our research is interdisciplinary, adopting and developing methods and perspectives in other areas, including Cognitive Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Multimodality.