Department of English Studies
Linguistic research at the English Department pursues applied, cognitive, variationist and historical agendas. Applied research focusses strongly on issues related to Language Teaching and Learning (e.g. Content and Language Integrated Learning, English Medium Instruction) as well as on questions related to the emergence of English as an international Lingua Franca, which figures also in variationist and descriptive research conducted at the department. Variation in language use is, however, also investigated with regard to native varieties of English, particularly in the morpho-syntactic domain. At the English department, such research is strongly corpus based, focusses on usage and discourse, and is carried out from functionalist, cognitive and sociolinguistic perspectives. Historical work at the department deals with phonological, grammatical and semantic developments, and is based on an understanding of languages as culturally evolving systems that can be understood in terms of generalised Darwinian Theory.