Steven Jones, PhD, BA (hons)
Lecturer in English Language, Programme Director: B.A. (Hons) Language, Literacy and Communication
Contact information:
Email: stevejones@manchester.ac.uk
Phone: 0161 2753411
Location: Humanities Devas Street A1.23
Research interests:
Most of my research is corpus-based. A corpus is a large body of naturally-occurring language, usually stored electronically, which can be searched in order to better understand how words are used. My early research was based on a 280-million-word corpus of newspaper data, but I'm currently looking at corpora of spoken language too. Semantics is the area of English Language that interests me most, and I'm particularly interested in antonyms ('opposites'). Having identified the discourse functions of antonymy in adult writing and speech, I'm now examining children's language to discover how and when 'opposites' are first learnt. I'm also interested in applying a corpus-based methodology to other linguistic fields, such as narratology and phraseology.
Teaching interests:
At undergraduate level, I am Programme Director for B.A. (Hons) Language, Literacy and Communication and lecture in the following areas:
- Text and Discourse Analysis
- Corpus Linguistics
- Pragmatics and Semantics
- Narrative Analysis
- Literary Linguistics
- Introductory Grammar
- Introductory Phonetics
At postgraduate level, I have supervised theses relating to antonymy (such as 'Negating Prefixation in English' and 'Markedness and Antonymy'), work in Applied Linguistics, and corpus-based research in related fields (such as literary linguistics, stylistics and narratology).
International experience:
I am a founder-member of the Comparative Lexical Relations Group (http://www.f.waseda.jp/vicky/complexica/index.html) and am currently involved with a British Academy funded project entitled Antonymy: a cross-linguistic study of canonicity, co-occurrence and context. I have recently delivered papers at the following international conferences:
- 'Googling for 'opposites': a phraseological approach to assessing antonym canonicity' Phraseology, October 2005, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.
- 'Comparing Antonym Use Across Four Corpora' International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME) May 2004, Verona, Italy.
- 'Teaching Antonymy: can corpora help?' Teaching and Learning Corpora (TALC) July 2002, Bertinoro, Italy.
- 'Lexicology and Corpora' International Computer Archive of Modern English (ICAME) June 1999, Freiburg, Germany.
I have also given invited talks or presented conference papers at Queens University, Belfast (1998), Lancaster University (2000 and 2002), Liverpool University (2001 and 2003), the University of Sussex (2002 and 2004), UCLAN (2004) and The University of Manchester (2004).
Selected recent/forthcoming publications:
Antonymy: a corpus-based perspective (Routledge 2002)
*Initiating the book series: Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics (edited by Anthony McEnery & Michael Hoey)
'Using Corpora to Investigate Antonym Acquisition'. (with Murphy, M.L., 2005) International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 10:3.
'The Discourse Functions of Antonymy in Spoken English' (2006) Text and Talk, 26:1
Comparing Antonym Use Across Four Corpora (forthcoming)
'Antonymy in Children's and Child-directed Speech'. (with Murphy, M.L., forthcoming)