Welcome to the Linguistics department page. You can find out more about our team as well as our approaches toward research and teaching here. In addition, there is information about our requirements for written work as well as possible topic areas for your final thesis.
Our Team
Find out more about the Linguistics department
English linguistics studies the English language in terms of its structure, its use as a means of communication, and as a social phenomenon. A wide variety of sub-disciplines have developed from these distinct perspectives.
Synchronic linguistics, the study of a language at a given point in time, traditionally includes the subdisciplines of phonetics and phonology (speech sounds), morphology (structure of words), syntax (structure of phrases and sentences), semantics (meaning), and text linguistics. In addition, pragmatics explores the meanings and intentions underlying language use in specific communicative contexts. Finally, historical linguistics investigates how the use and structure of the English language has changed since it emerged over 1500 years ago.
In addition, the field English linguistics has been enriched by a variety of approaches in recent decades, not least thanks to a growing interest in the relationship between language and society. Sociolinguistics is a diverse discipline, which includes the study of national, regional, social, and stylistic varieties of English, language policies, and the role of English as a world language that is in contact with other languages. Multilingualism has also emerged as a more recent field of research.
Like all scientists, linguists work with systematic, objective analyses and findings. They test hypotheses, develop models, advance theories, and construct bridges to neighbouring disciplines. Psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, for example, are devoted to explaining language knowledge and use in ways that are consistent with known psychological mechanisms and the findings of cognitive science. Today’s linguistic research is based on empirical data, collected using a variety of methods. Linguists conduct various experiments, or work with existing data from text corpora – systematic collections of authentic spoken or written language, available in digital form for contemporary as well as historical forms of English.
The diverse range of linguistic topics and approaches is reflected in our teaching, which places special emphasis on foundations in empirical methods in linguistics. Our department’s current research explores a wide variety of topics: usage-based approaches to language knowledge, acquisition, processing, variation, and change, which are oriented toward psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics; the use of English as a lingua franca (for example, in migration contexts); and work on various varieties of English, with a focus on Scottish English.
Research projects
Prof Dr Sabine Fiedler
- Global Anglicism Database Network (GLAD), an international research network aiming to share and compare strategies and resources for fostering cooperation among scholars interested in linguistic and cultural Anglicisation involving the widest possible range of speech communities (member since 2014, focus on German, phraseological anglicisms, see project description on leuris)
Prof Dr Sabine Fiedler
- Mobility and Inclusion in Multilingual Europe (MIME, 03/2014 – 08/2018) which received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Program (under grant agreement no. 613344, personal focus on lingua francas, see project description on leuris)
- German language project description on our homepage
Dr Antje Quick
Current:
- Usage-based approach to bilingual first language acquisition with Elena Lieven (Manchester), Michael Tomasello (Duke) & Ad Backus (Tilburg)
- Multiword units in code-mixing & methodological challenges: Revisiting the traceback method with Stefan Hartmann (Düsseldorf) & Nikolas Koch (München)
- Cross-linguistic comparisons of bilingual contact phenomena from a usage-based perspective with Dorota Gaskins (London), Mai Frick (Oulou), Oksana Baileul (Paris) & Elina Palola (Oulou)
- Contact Linguistics with Anna Verschik (Tallinn)
Completed:
- Understanding verbal indirect communication in monolingual and bilingual children with Cornelia Schulze (Leipzig), Anja Gampe (Zürich) & Moritz Daum (Zürich)
- Linguistic similarity effects on bilingual first language acquisition with Anja Gampe (Zürich) & Moritz Daum (Zürich)
Dr Jakob Neels
- The diachronic development of grammatical paradigms: A construction grammar perspective with Stefan Hartmann (Düsseldorf University)
- Refining frequency-effect explanations of grammaticalisation, PhD project, with corpus-based case studies on English and German contrasting idiolect data and aggregate data (see project description on leuris)