Research Interests for

Peter L. Patrick

Dept. of Language & Linguistics

University of Essex

Sociolinguistics –

o Models of linguistic community, norms, and ideology

Language and Human Rights –

o Language testing of asylum applicants: controversy over methods, best-practice standards, & developing the research base

Language variation and change –

o Urban dialectology, esp. sound change

o Inherent variation, its functions and development

o Language, class and ethnicity in a variationist framework

African American diaspora languages -

o Structure and use of Jamaican Creole: phonology, phonetics, syntax, morphology, semantics, pragmatics and lexicon

§ Esp. variation in verb tense/aspect & noun number-marking

o Caribbean creole narrative, folklore and verbal arts

o British Afro-Caribbean English (BrACE, aka ‘London Jamaican’): structure & origins

o U.S. African American Vernacular English (AAVE, aka 'Black English' or 'Ebonics')

o African-diaspora Creoles and vestigial Creoles in North America and the Atlantic area

Applied Sociolinguistics:

o Medical discourse analysis: doctor/patient interaction, ethnomedical narratives)

o Forensic linguistics, esp. application of linguistic variation, pragmatics & discourse in criminal trials

A detailed description of the kinds of PhD topics I supervise is available here (scroll down to my name)

Peter L. Patrick’s homepage

Last updated 30 June 2009