Research – English Studies
We do research both in English literature and English linguistics.
Research on Literature in English
At Lund, research on literature in the English language is conducted by one professor, five senior lecturers, four full-time doctoral students with salaried positions, and a couple of additional postgraduate students whose research is done on a part-time basis. Together we make up the Higher Seminar in English Literature.
A small unit in an international comparison, then; but our research is multi-faceted, and most of us have more than one leg to stand on research-wise. English Literature has been an independent Lund discipline for about half a century. Throughout that time, its leaders have encouraged colleagues and postgraduates to develop their own scholarly interests – wherever possible in collaboration with colleagues in other countries – rather than feel under pressure to join local specialities. The idea was, and still is, that the continual addition of new perspectives makes for a richer research climate.
Even so, there are certain emphases in our research activities, and the following fields engage more than one of us:
Research in English Linguistics
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:
Members of these clusters work as individuals, in collaboration with each other, and in a number of collaborations with other researchers at Lund and other universities and research institutes in Sweden and abroad.
Empirical methodologies
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.