Linguistics and language PhD

The linguistics research portfolio is evolving rapidly with enthusiastic and dedicated supervision for PhD work in linguistics and related language studies across a number of specialisms.

We offer a stimulating, supportive and rewarding environment for advanced postgraduate study and welcome proposals for PhD work on all areas of linguistics, in particular those with interdisciplinary potential, where you have opportunities to combine methodologies from linguistics with, for example, literature, creative writing, history and memory studies, health care or social science.

Areas of investigation currently or recently pursued by doctoral students include: the pragmatics of the communication of mathematics; the role of iconicity in sign language; meta-representation in the interpretation of Brechtian theatre; gender representation in Algerian school textbooks; intonation and communicative competence in L2 learners; pragmatic strategies and autism; a corpus-based study of gender and cross-cultural politeness strategies in email use.

Current Linguistics PhD and English language PhD students have been successful in obtaining studentships covering both fees and living costs through AHRC techne programme and University of Brighton Doctoral College Awards.

Our linguistics/English language PhD students have gone on to a variety of different roles following the successful completion of their research. These include academic posts as lecturers and postdoctoral research assistants at the University of Brighton and elsewhere, plus jobs in teaching, management, journalism and publishing.

Apply to 'humanities' in the applicant portal

Apply with us for funding through the AHRC Techne Doctoral Training Partnership

Key information

As a Linguistics and English Language PhD student, you will benefit from:

desk space and access to a computer in a space specifically designed for research students. There are a range of facilities on the Falmer site include various catering options.
access to a range of electronic resources via the university’s online library, as well as to the physical book and journal collections in the Falmer Library and other campus libraries in Moulsecoomb and in central Brighton.
state-of-the-art research facilities in Watson Building and you will have access to the Creative Methods Lab on the first floor, including access to specialist technical support.

Academic environment

As one of our students for the Linguistics PhD or English Language PhD at the University of Brighton you will work with dedicated research supervisors, who will help you though the planning and delivery of your research thesis and assist with your preparation towards a career.

Facilities include our Doctoral College, a supportive and approachable academic community, research training programmes and access to online facilities and library resources from the University of Brighton, London and the South East.

Our Centres of Research and Enterprise Excellence (COREs) and our research groups foster academic engagement across the humanities and social sciences. Locally, lectures, seminars and reading groups are organised by students and staff, and submission of funding bids - and dissemination of conference papers and publications – is encouraged and supported.

We aim to integrate all postgraduate students working on linguistics/English language topics with one or more of our centres or groups, allowing opportunities to present ‘work in progress’ and to network with other researchers.

We offer the following staff interests and focus as a guide to your application.

Language and language use in a narrow social context

The semantics-pragmatics interface
The pragmatics of non-verbal communication
Psycholinguistics and multimodality (sign, speech and co-gesture)
Iconicity in language
Pragmatics and prosody
Relevance theory
Modality and tense
Contextualism and evidentiality
Sign language linguistics

Language and language use in a wider social context

Discourse analysis
Sociophonetics
World English
Historical sociolinguistics
Language and gender
Language and sexuality (cybersex conversation)
Language and power
Language in contemporary culture
Marxist historical materialism
The language of neoliberalism

Some of our supervisors

Dr Federica Formato

I am interested in supervising students in the following disciplines (or combination of these):

- language, gender and sexuality

- corpus linguistics

- multimodality

- discourses around racism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia

- language describing violence against women in UK and other parts of the world.

Please do contact me if you are interested in spending a visiting period for your PhD research.

A Master student I surpervised in the a.y. 2019/2020 has recently won the Best Student Essay at the IGALA11 CONFERENCE (International gender and language association), Queen's Mary 2021.

Dr Chrystie Myketiak

Chrystie supervises six PhD students, and has two PhD student completions. She is happy to be contacted by prospective students who plan to investigate discourse in order to answer pressing sociocultural questions.

Broad areas of inquiry might include (and overlap on):

desire and pleasure
gender and sexualities
power, violence, and justice
politics of language/political language
identities and intersectionality
norms and belonging
critical discourse analysis/ queer linguistics/ conversation analysis/ multimodal discourse analysis

Dr Jelena Timotijevic

Jelena is currently supervising two PhD students who are focusing on Critical Discourse Analysis as an analytical framework for examination of language data.

She welcomes PhDs in the following areas:

Political discourse analysis, namely: confilct, protest and social movements; migration studies, discourse of nationalism, using Critical Discourse Analysis, Integrationism, Activity Theory as a form of history writing
Marxism and Philosophy of Language, including Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory applied to the research in Language Teacher Education, namely in the context of the role of emotion and cognition in language teaching and learning.
Intercultural Pragmatics; Contextualism and its varieties
Semantics/pragmatics interface and theoretical application to grammatical phenomena, mainly modality, tenses, reported speech. These can be applied to one language, or contrastively.

Dr Tim Wharton

Wharton has recently worked with a number of PhD students, working on a range of issues: the communication of mathematics (this PhD had a creative practice component); the role of prosody in the development of pragmatic competence among L2 learners; using relevance theory to adopting a ‘difference-not-deficit’ approach to language-use among people with autism.

He is currently working with students on the role of metaphor comprehension in pragmatic competence among L2 learners; lexical pragmatics and ‘Netspeak’ among Chinese internet users; relevance theory and the interpretation of Anglo-American modernist literature; relevance theory and Greek-English translation.

All of these reflect his interest in territories beyond those linguists and pragmatists traditionally seek to explore.

Specific areas of enquiry include, but are not limited to:

Pragmatics
Relevance theory
Non-verbal communication (including prosody)
Expressive meaning
Emotions and the communication of emotion
Pragmatics and cognitive science

Please contact Dr Wharton if you feel you have a PhD proposal which explores the territory that exists beyond traditional pragmatics.

For further supervisory staff including cross-disciplinary options, please visit research staff on our research website.

Making an application

You will apply to the University of Brighton through our online application portal. When you do, you will require a research proposal, references, a personal statement and a record of your education.

You will be asked whether you have discussed your research proposal and your suitability for doctoral study with a member of the University of Brighton staff. We recommend that all applications are made with the collaboration of at least one potential supervisor. Approaches to potential supervisors can be made directly through the details available online. If you are unsure, please do contact the Doctoral College for advice.

Please visit our How to apply for a PhD page for detailed information.

Fees and funding

Funding

Undertaking research study will require university fees as well as support for your research activities and plans for subsistance during full or part-time study.

Funding sources include self-funding, funding by an employer or industrial partners; there are competitive funding opportunities available in most disciplines through, for example, our own university studentships or national (UK) research councils. International students may have options from either their home-based research funding organisations or may be eligible for some UK funds.

Learn more about the funding opportunities available to you.

Tuition fees academic year 2021–22

Standard fees are listed below, but may vary depending on subject area. Some subject areas may charge bench fees/consumables; this will be decided as part of any offer made. Fees for UK and international/EU students on full-time and part-time courses are likely to incur a small inflation rise each year of a research programme.

MPhil/PhD
	Full-time	Part-time
UK	£4,450	£2,225
International (including EU)	£15,126	£7,563
International students registered in the School of Humanities and Social Science or in the School of Business and Law	£13,326	£6,663

Professional doctorate
Full-time	Part-time
N/A	£2,673 (UK/EU)

PhD by Publication
Full-time	Part-time
N/A	£2,225 (UK)

Contact Brighton Doctoral College

To contact the Doctoral College at the University of Brighton we request an email in the first instance. Please visit our contact the Brighton Doctoral College page.

For supervisory contact, please see individual profile pages.