Research – English Studies

We do research both in English literature and English linguistics.

At Lund, research on literature in the English language is conducted by one professor, one docent, four senior lecturers, and two full-time doctoral students with salaried positions.  A small unit in an international comparison, then; but our research is multifaceted, and most of us have more than one leg to stand on research-wise. English Literature has been an independent Lund discipline for more than half a century. Throughout that time, the idea has been that the continual addition of new perspectives makes for a richer research climate.

With that idea in view, research in English literature at Lund covers a range of different periods and genres and employs a variety of different critical methodologies, including new techniques from digital humanities.  Areas of particular expertise include early modern drama; eighteenth-century and Romantic-period literature and culture; nineteenth-century writing; modernism; contemporary Irish literature; and constructions of the body, and of desire, in a range of contemporary media.  Current focal points include: adaptations of Shakespeare, and studies of Shakespeare in performance; theories of perception in Romantic-period cultural texts; the relationship between romanticisms and romantic nationalisms in Britain and the Nordic countries; women’s fashion in nineteenth-century novels; the translation to Swedish of British reform literature; rhetoric in the novels of Dickens; the visual in the work of George Eliot; modernism and romanticism in the poetics of T.S. Eliot; the financial crash and Irish fiction; and women’s writing of the interwar period.

Language, Cognition and Discourse@Lund (LCD@L)

LCD@L is a research group led by Carita Paradis concerned with usage-based research approaches to make theoretical advances. Our research focuses on how language means when it is used in discourse, how language is acquired and processed, how it develops, and how language varies across social contexts and times. We use hypothesis-driven experimental methods, quantitative and qualitative corpus methodologies, and discourse-analytical techniques.

Current research topics include oppositeness, negation, monitoring processes in reading and text comprehension, metonymy and metaphor, phraseological processing, trust and trust-repair, agents and argument realization, language and politics, stance-taking in big data, multilingualism, sensory perceptions, multimodal literacy, contemporary grammaticalization of stance expressions.

Our work is organized around three main research clusters, which are:

Our research focuses on theoretical development and meaning modeling using quantitative corpus methodologies as well as experimental techniques. The meaningful functioning of language in use is at the core of our research approach at all levels from grammar, through words and constructions to text and discourse.

Our research is mainly in the field of theoretical syntax and the minimalist program(s). We are also interested in the application of corpus-based and experimental methodologies in the analysis of linguistic data. Many of the topics that we are interested in are at the borderline of syntax and semantics or syntax and information structure; middles, passives and other non-active sentences, and marked structures like clefts and existential sentences are just some examples of our current research topics.

Our research is concerned with the learning of English as a second language, by children and adults, language education, language testing, and language policy and planning including aspects of multilingualism in society in general and in education in Sweden in particular.

Our pioneering role in Sweden in the creation and use of computerized corpora has led to the use of corpus data in many areas of research, e.g. in semantics and discourse analysis. We also make use of different experimental methodologies, enabled by our state-of-the-art Humanities Lab.