Who am I?

I am a corpus linguist researching multilingual and monolingual data, conceptually written and spoken. Previous and current varieties include (in alphabetical order) English, French, German, Italian, Luxembourgish, Swiss-German, and Romansh. My corpus work either feeds into language description (especially for less widely taught languages) or language pedagogy.

At the moment, I am a post-doctoral research officer at Leipzig University for which I am analysing multilingual SMS (mobile phone text messages) for the project "SMS communication in Switzerland". I am also a Research Associate at the Bangor University Centre for Bilingualism and an Honorary Research Fellow in Luxembourg Studies at the University of Sheffield.

Background

I grew up in Luxembourg where I studied English Studies (Literature and Linguistics) for two years, which fed into the completion of a BA in English Language at Bangor University. In 2005, I finished an MA at the University of Sheffield and I submitted my PhD thesis in July 2009. My BA and MA dissertations, and my PhD thesis concentrated on Luxembourgish Linguistics, after which I concentrated on corpus linguistics linked to language teaching and learning. You can read my work on the publications page.

Research

From July 2009 to June 2012 I worked on an AHRC/DFG research project carried out by Bangor University and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. This project, "What's Hard in German?" (WHiG) aimed to discover difficult formulaic language and grammatical structures in German as produced by learners of German. More about my research on the projects page.

Interests

My research interests include corpus linguistics, corpus methods in language teaching and learning, formulaic language and collocations, computer-mediated communication (CMC), and Luxembourgish linguistics. I also have an "interest for pleasure" in folk linguistics, constructed languages, writing scripts, and typography.

Designed and Developed by Rowan Hotham-Gough