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English Linguistics

The English Linguistics Centre has significant research strengths in Corpus Linguistics; Sociolinguistics; Language, Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Language and the Law. Its Corpus Linguistic work is centred around the Research & Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES), which develops open-access text analysis software (e.g. WebCorp, eMargin) with 5,000+ monthly users in education, government and industry worldwide. RDUES produced a 4* impact case study in REF2021, and there has been an expansion in impact activity since. Academics in linguistics regularly apply a mix of methods in their research, combining statistics, visualisation, and qualitative approaches to the study of social, cultural, and legal issues, working with a variety of external stakeholders and partners. Examples include the monograph Language and Mediated Masculinities (Lawson, OUP), and funded research on legal-lay communication (Grieshofer) and the COVID pandemic (involving all members of the cluster). All colleagues are regular contributors to public-facing outputs, including articles in The Conversation, and podcast and interview appearances. 

Speech bubble postits

Our Research & Development Unit for English Studies (RDUES) is a world-leading centre for research in corpus linguistics that applies linguistic methods to academic fields beyond Linguistics and to contemporary ‘real world’ contexts. As such, RDUES has developed a number of widely used software tools for the study of real language use. The research of RDUES focuses on web data, including analyses of language change over time, sense relations between words (e.g. synonymy/antonymy), collocation, neologisms, and topic ('aboutness'). Beyond RDUES, our specialists are working on a wide range of topics including the language of litigants in person, and research on the language of toxic masculinities and the language of far-right groups. 

We have a strong track record of attracting external funding from a variety of sources, including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESRC), Jisc, Leverhulme Trust, and the Fulbright Commission. Recent funded research with direct social impact includes a KTP (led by Kehoe) with the Midlands-based Renato Software, which is drawing upon the RDUES’ text analysis expertise to fill a key knowledge gap, adding linguistic insight to improve safeguarding software for schools. Another major success involving all members of the Linguistics cluster was TRAC:COVID (AHRC). This rapid-response project conducted a large-scale linguistic analysis of the changing conversation about COVID-19 on Twitter (now X), including ‘antivax’ discourse. The team built a novel open-access dashboard to visualise patterns in language use during the pandemic. Their findings on the public response to government messaging were cited in a House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report. 

Areas of activity 

Our research covers a range of topics in the fields of corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and the law. Examples include the application of corpus methods to the analysis of a wide range of social issues including nationalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, as well as the use of the web as a source of natural language data and the development of software tools to facilitate this. 

Research Staff

 Projects and Related Articles