Plenary speakers

Lieselotte Anderwald has been Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Kiel (Germany) since 2008. She is a corpus linguist specialising in non-standard grammar and has researched negation in British varieties (Negation in Non-Standard British English, Routledge 2002) and non-standard past tense forms in British dialects (The Morphology of English Dialects, Cambridge 2009). More recently, she has investigated prescriptive grammar writing in 19th-century Britain and the U.S. (Language between Description and Prescription, Oxford 2016) and has linked this to processes of language change more widely. She has also examined the evolution of morphological Americanisms, and is currently investigating the historical enregisterment of general vernacular features in a multitude of sources.

Hendrik De Smet is associate professor of English linguistics at the Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven. His research is concerned with the mechanisms of language change, particularly the question of how grammatical and semantic changes can find a foothold in a language system and within a speech community. To answer this question, he tries to exploit historical corpus data to peak into the minds of speakers of the past. He teaches historical linguistics, English linguistics and cognitive-functional linguistics. He firmly believes in sharing the corpora he compiled, and in reaching out to the general public to promote his discipline through the linguistics blog (in Dutch) he co-founded.

Rob Drummond is Professor of Sociolinguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His primary interests lie in the relationship between spoken language and identity, and language-based prejudice. He recently led the Manchester Voices project (manchestervoices.org) which explored the accents, dialects and identities of people in Greater Manchester, creating a shared dataset of recorded reflections on language from the region. Rob does a lot of public-facing academic work, and is the author of You’re All Talk: Why we are what we speak (Scribe Publications, 2023).

Tove Larsson is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics at Northern Arizona University. She is also affiliated with Uppsala University and UCLouvain. She specializes in corpus linguistics and research methods, focusing specifically on learner corpus research, L2 writing, and grammatical complexity. Her work appears in journals such as the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, and Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. She serves on several editorial boards (e.g. Journal of English for Academic Purposes) and is the Review Editor for the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research. She has taught courses on linguistics, research methods, and statistics in Sweden, Belgium, and the U.S.