Phd in Linguistics

Queen Mary University of London

The Department is one of the leading Linguistics research departments in the UK (top-ranked in the last two national assessment exercises, REF 2014 and RAE 2008). The Department's research encompasses both the structure of language and its use within speech communities and different social contexts.

We have a lively programme of seminars, reading groups, PhD training workshops, and invited guest lectures. Graduate students also receive advanced training in research methodology and specific areas of linguistics from the department's own research training workshops and from advanced core training in linguistics. The Department also works closely with other linguistics in the School, who have specific interests in French, German and Hispanic languages.

Students have access to the major academic libraries and resources in London, in addition to our own study facilities. The Department has a purpose-built suite of linguistics laboratories and recording studio. The laboratory is fully stocked with state-of-the-art recording and transcribing equipment, a comprehensive range of public corpora and software for analysing language and dedicated workstations for graduate students and research fellows.

Research areas

Our specific areas of interest are: syntax, semantics and morphology; prosody, tone and intonation; the structure of spoken language; psycholinguistics and experimental approaches; dialect syntax; and sociolinguistics including variationist, interactional and discourse-analytic approaches.

Current research projects include work on phi-theory, nominal and pronominal structure, definiteness, experimental morphosemantics, dialect retention and change, indexicality and speech perception, language and the media and urban youth language.