About
I am the Baines Professor of English Language in the Department of English at Liverpool University. I teach and research in a number of areas of English language and linguistics, but am best known for my work in Stylistics, Pragmatics, Critical Linguistics and English Language Pedagogy. My publications have included, inter alia, studies of the sociolinguistic features of pop singing styles, the pragmatics of advertising discourse and the linguistic patterns of verbal humour. My books include 'Language, Ideology and Point of View' and 'Language through Literature'. I am the co-editor of the collection 'Language, Discourse and Literature' and co-author of 'Language and Power' (Routledge, 2009). Up to the end of 2009, I was the Editor of 'Language and Literature', a leading Stylistics journal published four times a year by Sage, and I am now a member of the Editorial Board of this journal. I was Chair of the international Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) from 2013 to 2015. With the assistance of an AHRC grant, I published in 2003 a monograph on the discourse of humour ('On the Discourse of Satire', Benjamins) which examines the linguistic and communicative dynamics of contemporary satirical discourse. My textbook 'Stylistics' will appear in a third edition with Routledge in 2025.
I continue to develop my research in pragmatics, stylistics, discourse analysis, critical linguistics and, more recently, forensic linguistics. I have recently published with Benjamins an edited volume 'Style, Rhetoric and Creativity in Language' (2019) and recent individual articles and chapters include a piece entitled ‘Irony and its Consequences in the Public Sphere’ which appeared in 'The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought'. Another recent chapter is ‘Mechanical inelasticity in discourse: A Bergsonian perspective on dialogue, humour and style’ coming out soon in the volume 'Style as Motivated Choice'. My monograph with Bloomsbury, 'Irony: Pragmatic, Social and Legal Consequences’, is near completion, while a new co-authored project on the language of novelist Ernest Hemingway is planned for a book series with Palgrave which I co-edit.
I am happy to supervise doctoral work in all of the research areas outlined above. Intending applicants can contact me by email, but approaches must make explicit (i) how the proposed project links to my own published work and (ii) why the applicant feels I would make a suitable supervisor for their Doctoral research.
My office hours are Tuesdays 3-4pm.