News and Events

On 16 November 2016 we hosted the Seminar The Sociolinguistics of Gibraltar in the 21st Century. The program comprised three talks, the first by Cristina Suárez-Gómez (University of the Balearic Islands) with the title “Gibraltarian English and its status within ‘World Englishes’”, which dealt with the recent history of Gibraltar and the linguistic status of Gibraltarian English according to model of analyses of World Englishes, essentially Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model and the analyses of data by D. Levey and D.

We are pleased to announce that the Tampere-Helsinki research consortium Democratization, Mediatization and Language Practices in Britain, 1700–1950 has received four-year funding from the Academy of Finland (560,000 EUR). The team members are Paivi Pahta (PI), Minna Palander-Collin, Minna Nevala, Arja Nurmi, Jukka Tyrkkö and Turo Hiltunen.

On February 29 and March 1, Professor Ulrike Gut, from the University of Münster, gave an eight hour seminar on “Grammatical variation across varieties of English and the compilation of corpora for their study”.

On 3 December Cristina Suárez-Gómez (University of the Balearic Islands) gave a talk at the Faculty of Philology and Translation entitled “Structural creativity in multilingual countries." In her presentation she examined structural creativity in World Englishes, i.e. varieties of English which have emerged in multilingual countries. Basing the analysis on data from the International Corpus of English (http://ice-corpora.net/), she explored relative clauses in the spoken language of the Englishes spoken in Hong-Kong, India and Singapore.