Interests:
My principal research interests are in syntax and syntactic theory, information structure, cross-linguistic and dialectal variation, and linguistic interfaces and interface phenomena, in particular pragmatic markers in different varieties of English.
Biography:
I am an Associate Professor in Linguistics at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, a Tutorial Fellow in Linguistics at Somerville College, and a Lecturer in Linguistics at St Hugh’s College. I received a BA in English Language and Linguistics from Durham University in 1993. After graduating, I moved to Hong Kong, where I taught English and worked in publishing. I spent over 10 years writing and editing English Language Teaching materials for the Asian market. After returning to the UK, I received an MA (2003) and a PhD (2007) from the University of Manchester. My PhD research provided a new typological perspective on question formation framed within the non-derivational theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar based on spoken and written data from four case-study languages: Japanese, Hungarian, English, and Malay. After receiving my PhD, I held a Faculty of Humanities Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester. I was awarded a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2007, transferring to the University of Oxford in 2008, where I was subsequently a Departmental Lecturer in Syntax between 2010 and 2016. From 2011 to 2012 I was a Visiting Researcher at the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. I am proud to have been shortlisted three times in the category Most Acclaimed Lecturer (Humanities) at the Oxford University Students Union Student-led Teaching Awards, and to have won the award in 2014.
Publications:
A full list of my publications along with information about my teaching, outreach work, grants and awards, and further information about my current research is available on my Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics staff page.
