English Language and Applied Linguistics - Postgraduate Research Opportunities

English Language and Applied Linguistics PhD/MA by Research

The University has been ranked as one of the world's top 50 institutions to study English Language and Literature in the 2019 QS World Rankings.

The MA by Research programme requires you to prepare a dissertation of up to 40,000 words on a topic of your choice, for which an academic staff member will provide expert supervision.

The PhD – the most advanced research degree – leads to a dissertation of up to 80,000 words on a subject of your choice and under the expert supervision of an academic member of staff.

Research interests of staff include:

Corpus Research - In corpus research, we are well known for our innovative approaches to the analysis of with large data sets, which have had a strong impact on language teaching and dictionary development, academic English, and interdisciplinary discourse. We are home to the Centre for Corpus Research (CCR), which supports the use of corpus analysis in research, teaching and learning. CCR provides access to a range of corpora and has a dedicated computer suite with specialist resources.

Cognitive Linguistics and Psycholinguistics - Our research in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics covers a wide range of areas including figurative language, idioms, embodied cognition, language and perception, sign languages, second language acquisition, and construction grammar. The department has a linguistics laboratory which includes specialist eye-tracking equipment. We have particular strengths in British Sign Language, Australian Sign Language and gesture studies.

Discourse Analysis and Stylistics - We are known for the development of several highly influential discourse analysis frameworks, and for our work on narrative, the discursive representation of inequality, new media, the language of politics, as well as new ideas on evaluation and phraseology. Our research draws on a variety of linguistic and theoretical traditions, including: systemicfunctional linguistics; critical discourse analysis; corpus linguistics; multimodal analysis; narrative analysis; conversation analysis, and genre analysis.

Please visit the College of Arts and Law funding page for information on possible funding opportunities.