Linguistics Department - Queen Mary University of London

08/11/2023

We are excited to announce the publication of two outstanding recent MA dissertations in our Queen Mary Occasional Papers in Linguistics series.

Published today, QMOPAL 49 is Becky Howard's dissertation on the ways in which feminism has been portrayed in young women's magazine coverlines from 1977 to 2017.

Forthcoming, the 50th QMOPAL paper is Philip Grant's dissertation on the semantics of possessive ordinal and superlative DPs in English.

All papers are available to download from: https://qmul.ac.uk/sllf/linguistics/research/working-papers/

Queen Mary’s OPAL is an occasional series of working papers by faculty, students, and affiliated visitors at the Department of Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London as well as extramural collaborators.

09/10/2023

We are pleased to announce that Jessica Zihuan Zhong has been awarded a PhD for Research in Linguistics, with the thesis, '"Human Rights" in the People's Daily: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study'.

Dr Zhong was supervised by Prof. Colleen Cotter and Prof. Jenny Cheshire.

29/08/2023

🗓️ Save the Date!

On the occasion of Tom Meadows dissertation defence, we are pleased to announce an afternoon workshop, entitled ‘A-bar Matters’ on Wednesday 13th September.

Guest speakers will include:

•Tom Meadows (QMUL)
•Prof. Ad Neeleman (UCL)
•Dr. Doreen Georgi (Potsdam)
•Prof. David Adger (QMUL)

Further information on the talks, potential additional speakers and hybrid options will be announced shortly!

20/07/2023

New funding has been awarded to the Generics Across Languages project, a collaboration between colleagues in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London, University of East Anglia, Cambridge, Oxford, and Toronto. http://www.dimitra-lazaridou-chatzigoga.com/generics-across-languages/

The funding from the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund will allow the project to pilot research into 5 additional languages. The project aims to investigate generics across 50 languages, covering 23 language families, 3 isolates, and 2 sign languages.

The Generics Across Languages is a collaborative project, with Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga (University of East Anglia and Cambridge University), Matt Husband (University of Oxford), Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary University of London) and Suzi Lima (University of Toronto).

Generics Across Languages Collaborative project with Matt Husband (University of Oxford), Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary University of London) and Suzi Lima (University of Toronto) Growing out of my research on generics (e.g.‘Tigers have stripes’ or ‘Jessie delivers the mail’) both from a theo...

14/02/2023

Huge thanks to Yaron Matras for his Forensic Linguistics guest talk for our students last Friday! His talk on the (mis)use of linguistic methods in the asylum process, and the subsequent barriers refugees face shows the importance of real science and expertise in society.

02/02/2023

📄 PhD student Chiara Ardoino has published an article in Language and Society entitled 'Navigating the pitfalls of language standardisation: The imperfect binary of authenticity and anonymity in Creole-speaking Martinique.'

The article can be viewed at

Navigating the pitfalls of language standardisation: The imperfect binary of authenticity and anonymity in Creole-speaking Martinique

15/07/2022

Prof. Hagit Borer has given an interview for Revista Linguistica. You can check it out here:

Como parte del I Encuentro RELIF entrevistamos a distintes investigadores internacionales para conocer sus principales ideas acerca de nuestra disciplina. Al...

15/06/2022

Dr. Johanna Gerwin ran a hugely successful stall last weekend at QMUL's Festival of Communities, with the help of PhD students Caitlin Hogan and Marc Barnard. For information and photos, please check out Johanna's blog: https://londontalksresearch.co.uk/2022/06/15/london-talks-and-the-tower-hamlets-community/

06/06/2022

Please join us for this year's Jenny Cheshire Lecture, this Friday 10 June at 4:30pm. Prof. Meyerhoff will give a talk entitled 'On aesthetics and language variation'. For more details and info on how to register, see

Most people know that different ways of saying things sound “nice” or “funny” or “sexy”. But linguists are curiously reluctant to engage directly with the fact that we have an aesthetic response to language variation. Qualitative sociolinguists, following anthropologist colleagues, are m...

30/05/2022

This Wednesday 1 June at 4:30pm Rob Podesva will give an online Guest Speaker talk entitled 'A sociolinguistic perspective on why it is necessary to distinguish among types of creaky voice'.
For more info, check out https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/linguistics/events/upcoming-events/items/rescheduled-to-1-june-guest-speaker-seminar-series-rob-podesva-stanford.html