Research interests

Fitzmaurice's research focuses on the history of the English language, using methodological perspectives provided by historical pragmatics and historical sociolinguistics. She is particularly interested in exploring the methods and kinds of evidence employed in historical approaches to language study.

She is currently focussing on semantic change and exploring different approaches to historical semantics. She recently delivered the plenary lecture at SHEL 8 (Studies in the History of the English Language) in Utah on the role of contingent polysemy in the changing meanings of politeness in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (summer 2013).

Her research on English in the eighteenth century utilizes the frameworks of social networks analysis, corpus linguistics, and discourse analysis. Her data are drawn principally from the Network of Eighteenth century English texts (NEET). This is a large unconventional historical electronic corpus of letters, fiction, prose drama and essays produced by Joseph Addison and the members of his social milieu.

Fitzmaurice is currently investigating on the history of the English language in colonial and post-colonial Zimbabwe. The first publication in the project on the history and structure of the colonial variety, ' L1Rhodesian English', appears in The Lesser-Known Varieties of English, (eds.) Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider, & Jeffrey P. Williams. Cambridge University Press (2010), pp. 263-285. She has also contributed a chapter on White Zimbabwean English (WhZimE) to the Mouton World Atlas of Variation in English (WAVE), 2013.

She has received British Academy support to investigate undocumented varieties of spoken English in Zimbabwe and is collaborating with scholars and students at the University of Zimbabwe on this strand of the larger Zimbabwe project.

Research interests

I´ve been working on syntactic and semantic phenomena including binding, scrambling, topic/focus. (floating) quantifiers, classifiers and wh-indeterminates.

Currently, I am working on a paper on binding which explores a way how the latest Minimalist Program framework can account for core binding patters of long-distance anaphora. At the same time, I work in collaboration with Dr. G. Tsoulas on wh-indeterminates in languages such as Korean and Japanese.

In Second Language Acquisition, I am interested in acquisition of morphological agreement and inflection and polarity item `any´ and null arguments.

Research Interests

I am interested in hearing from PhD applicants who wish to conduct qualitative or predominantly qualitative projects relating to academic writing, academic literacies, ESP/EAP, or language teaching materials/textbooks.

I am a qualitative researcher, and the primary research methods I use in my work are interviews and textual analysis. My doctoral thesis is a corpus-based study of how the personal pronouns I and WE are used in academic writing across four disciplines (Business, Economics, Computing, and Physics) by ‘experts’ writing journal articles and postgraduate students writing dissertations. I have published papers on taking a lexical approach to ELT and on taking a corpus-based critical pragmatic approach to English for academic purposes. More recent work includes research on citation in academic writing, on proofreaders’ beliefs and practices when working on student texts, and on supervisors’ and supervisees’ experiences of master’s dissertation supervision. I have published my findings in outlets such as Applied Linguistics, Written Communication, Text & Talk, English for Specific Purposes, Journal of Pragmatics, Studies in Higher Education, Journal of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, and Journal of Business & Technical Communication.

In general, my research interests lie in the following areas:

• Analysis of academic writing—analysing the text and interviewing writers about their texts
• Citation analysis
• Academic literacies in higher education
• Academic socialisation in higher education
• English for specific and academic purposes
• Development and use of and language teaching materials and textbooks
• Critical pedagogy
• English language teaching and learning

Research interests

My research interests are primarily in the field of perceptual dialectology, and specifically the methodological approaches to the study of non-linguists' perceptions. My research has focussed on locations in the north of England and southern Scotland, and has discussed the role of (real and imagined) borders in perception.

My research is not restricted to perceptual dialectology and I am also interested in the wider field of folk linguistics and language attitudes, that is to say, how linguistically naive informants respond to language, and the reasons behind these responses.

My research has investigated ways of integrating techniques used in the field of Geographical Science with those used in the study of language variation and perception, with a particular focus on the possibilities offered by GIS technologies.

I am also generally interested in sociolinguistic and dialectological methodologies, lexical erosion and language variation and change.

Research interests

My doctoral research developed a method of combining (Faircloughian) critical discourse analysis with corpus linguistic tools in the analysis of education policy. I drew also on regulation school state theory in order to critically examine the evolving relationship between policy agendas and wider developments in the UK economy, politics and society. I am particularly interested in the way policy discourse is used to construct and legitimate neoliberal identities, roles and power relations between citizen and state. Key themes explored in my recent publications are the historic emergence of an ‘enabler’ model of governance and the use of ‘personalisation’ as a legitimation strategy in policy.

More generally I am interested in the strategic role of (national) policy discourse in recontextualising, disseminating and legitimating dominant political imaginaries in advanced liberal economies. My current research applies and elaborates this approach to critically explore the social construction of ageing in the UK. Focussing on policy and public discourse, this work aims to contribute a critical discourse perspective to academic debates on societal and political responses to population ageing.

Research interests

Both my teaching and my research have engendered a keen interest in linguistic variation, a significant influence in my current projects. My interest in language favours the application of quantitative (corpus linguistics) techniques in order to extract patterns and conditions of use from authentic data. My research looks into the sociolinguistics of grammar, i.e. how and to what extent the wider (sociolinguistic) context of language use impinges on formal grammatical structures. In this regard, my research is amenable to areas such as syntax (especially verbal complementation), (recent) variation and change, spoken language, dialect variation, World Englishes, creole languages, language contact, and language acquisition.

This year I have obtained (with colleagues from the University of Sussex and the University of Yaounde I) a British Academy Small Grant to build a small corpus of Cameroon Pidgin English).

Research interests

To date, all of my research has been directed at trying to reach a more complete understanding of how we use linguistic resources when we engage in everyday conversation. In my research I use auditory and acoustic phonetic techniques in combination with Conversation Analysis (CA) in analysing audio and video recordings of unscripted interaction.

I have published work on topics including turn-taking, turn construction, turn continuation and the signalling of attitude and emotion in conversation. As a development of this work I have examined visual aspects of interaction (gaze and gesture) in addition to phonetic detail and sequential organisation. In my research I have studied interactions between adults, and between parents and young children.

I would be pleased to hear from anybody interested in conducting research into everyday talk, especially if that work involves (or might involve) phonetics and/or conversation analysis.

Research interests

Broadly speaking, my specialty is Late Medieval and Early Modern English language, and my research methods are derived from historical linguistics, especially pragmatics. In particular, I have worked extensively with manuscript and digital letter collections in order to study actual English, dating from c.1400-1650.

I also have strong research interests in manuscript studies, paleography, digital editing and corpora - in particular the implications these perspectives have for the historical study of language.

At the moment, I am developing research on: 1) the history of verbal irony (e.g. sarcasm, mock (im)politeness and banter) in English, as evidenced by both literary and non-literary texts; and 2) the letters and language of Margaret Tudor (1489-1541), princess of England and Queen of Scots.