Research

A major outcome of my PhD thesis has been the development of a novel analytical framework that conceptualises elite political discourse as a claim to what I term 'voteworthiness'. The framework facilitates analysis of the linguistic resources used by political elites to persuade others, either explicitly or implicitly, drawing on Aristotle's modes of persuasion (Ethos, Pathos and Logos).

I am the Research Associate on this project working with Dr Louise Mycock at the University of Oxford to examine the use of 'Protags' - right dislocated pronoun tags -  It's great, that.

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Using a corpus of over 3,900 plays dating from the 16th to the 20th Century, our aim is to identify the frequency, form and function of this relatively rare non-canonical construction and establish whether use changes between Early Modern english and Modern Day British English.

In a corpus of over 4,000 newspaper articles that mention the European Union from The Guardian in the first 6 months leading up to the 2016 Brexit referendum, the lemma 'crisis' is considerably more frequent than in articles that don't mention the EU.

My Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study focuses on articles which addressed economic crisis and found that despite the publication's explicit pro-EU stance, an underlying negative portrayal of the European Union had the potential to undermine Remain messaging.

Media coverage highlighted conflict between EU nations, disparity in the experience of citizens from different EU countries and risk to the UK.

This project, funded by the Higher Education Futures Institute at the University of Birmingham, aims to develop an analytical protocol for non-linguist academics designed to facilitate analysis of free-text student feedback comments.

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Using the intuitive corpus tools on the  Sketch Engine interface, academics and professional services staff can quickly and easily query their data to identify significant themes and concerns raised by students.