Research areas
Members of the Language in Context Research Group are engaged in a wide range of research activities. These can largely be grouped into four areas. More information about the research interests of the individual participants can be found on the Participants page.
Language and social identity
Almost all of the research undertaken and workshopped in the Language in Context group relates directly or indirectly to the question of how language relates to identity, and we consider identity issues to be central to a full understanding of how language makes us uniquely human. In addition to the work detailed below, we have research strengths in the field of language and gender and language and local identities. Miriam Meyerhoff has published extensively on gender and language; a lot of her work shows that variation in the distribution of speech acts, alongside the use of local and supralocal languages, help construct local ideologies of gender and authority. Erik Schleef also has research expertise on language and gender, as well as the relationship between language and identity in sites of cross-cultural communication. Claire Cowie works on new identities associated with English and emerging ideologies of difference. Joseph Gafaranga has made significant contributions to the research which advances our understanding about the significant resources that bi- and multilingual speakers bring to bear on the presentation of selves in institutional settings.
Language contact and change
There are several on-going projects relating to language contact and contact-induced variation and change. Miriam Meyerhoff has research interests in Pacific and Caribbean creoles and a lot of her work is concerned with evaluating substrate influence in creole development. Some of the results challenge L2-based theories of creolisation and further advance basic documentation of the genesis and development of variously lexified Pacific creoles. More recent work regarding the creole status of copula deletion evaluates the nature of variation in individual and community grammars. Claire Cowie maintains active research interests in global varieties of English, including on-going work exploring the sources of miscommunication between speakers of Indian English and Inner Circle varieties.
Language in interaction
Joseph Gafaranga works within the traditions of discourse analysis. He has argued that ways in which the notion of ‘medium’ is more appropriate than the notion of ‘language’ for explaining the organization of talk in two languages. He rejects the commonsense view that language reflects society, maintaining that language itself is a social identity and structure interacting in complex ways with non-linguistic social structures. He is particularly interested in the role language plays in mediating institutional services and defining institutional settings. Forthcoming work in this area will explore the trilingual norms of institutional discourse in Rwanda. Erik Schleef has conducted research on interactional norms in higher education, noting that what appear to be subject-specific discourse conventions trump gender in classroom interaction. Claire Cowie is interested in the symbolic value that different accents have for workers in the Indian call centre industry, and the polyfunctionality of some constructions which serve politeness and subculture identification across different registers.
Linguistic ideas in the world
John Joseph has an international reputation in the field of the history of linguistics and argues that many aspects of language, from its role in establishing national identity to its lexical and syntactic structures, can only be understood if we appreciate that language is political from top to bottom. As well as interests in the role of language in creating national and religious/ethnic identities in several current contexts, he is currently working on a biography of Ferdinand de Sausurre which places Sausurre's linguistic theories in their historical and cultural contexts.