Linguistics and language PhD

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 Mouslecoomb 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. 

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

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 omophobia

- 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. 

Dr Mandie Iveson

I am interested in supervising students in the following areas:

• Language attitudes and ideologies
• Discourses of nationalism; national identity; intersections of class/ethnicity/gender; political discourse
• Public participation in political discourse; grassroots movements
• Discourses of populism
• Digital and mediated communications 

Dr Chrystie Myketiak

Chrystie supervises PhD students investigating language use and discourse in situated contexts. She is very happy to be contacted by prospective students, especially those who can see themselves contributing to the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender and/or the Performance and Communities Research and Enterprise Group. 

Specific areas of linguistic inquiry might include (and overlap on):

• gender, sexualities, desire
• power, justice, politics of language/political language
• norms, belonging, intersectionality, violence
• discourse analysis and narrative
• ambiguity and error
• digital corpora, multimodal approaches, large text datasets

Dr Tim Wharton

I currently have a number of PhD students, working on a range of issues: the communication of mathematics (this PhD has a creative practice component); the role of prosody in the development of pragmatic competence among L2 learners; the role of metaphor comprehension in pragmatic competence among L2 learners. lexical pragmatics and ‘Netspeak’ among Chinese internet users; adopting a ‘difference-not-deficit’ approach to language-use among people with autism; relevance theory and the interpretation of Anglo-American modernist literature. All of these reflect my 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 me 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.