Terry Walker

Background

I am Professor of English Linguistics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. I completed my PhD in English Linguistics in 2005 at Uppsala University, where I collaborated on the project A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760. Together with Professor Merja Kytö (Uppsala University) and Professor Peter J. Grund (Yale University), I have edited An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760. My particular interest in this historical period began when I did my Bachelor of Arts degree in Post-Renaissance European History at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England. My publications include a monograph, two co-authored books, five edited collections, and a number of articles and book chapters on historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and computer-assisted language learning.

Area of interest

Corpus linguistics, historical linguistics, philology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics and computer-assisted language learning

Research

I am working with Merja Kytö on several studies of language change in Early Modern English. In 2019 we wrote two articles, which we presented at conferences in June 2019: one has been published in 2020 and the other has been published in 2022. We are currently working on a further article. Another article “L’interaction orale du passé : A Corpus of English Dialogues 1560–1760” was published in the journal Langages in 2020.

Research work with Peter J. Grund concerns how speech is presented in writing in witness depositions from England during the period 1560-1760. We have written an article entitled “‘speaking base approbious words’: Speech Representation in Early Modern English Witness Depositions”, which was published in the Journal of Historical Pragmatics (18: 1) in 2017. We have also completed another study entitled “Free indirect speech, slipping, or a system in flux? Exploring the continuum between direct and indirect speech in Early Modern English”, a draft of which was presented in August 2016 at the workshop “The Dynamics of Speech Representation in the History of English”, which we organised at the University of Duisberg-Essen, Germany. The papers from the workshop were published as an edited volume by Oxford University Press in 2020, with Peter J. Grund and myself as editors. We are currently investigating speech-reporting expressions in Early Modern English: one article has already been published in 2020, and we will extend this study in a further article.

I organized a symposium “Incorporating Corpora in Teaching”, together with Associate Professor Rachel Allan (Mid-Sweden University), which was held online (in Zoom) on Friday 23 October 2020. Please contact me if you would like access to the recordings etc. from the symposium.

I have been working on two special issues of the Nordic Journal of English Studies (NJES): “Data-Driven Learning: Tools, Approaches, and Next Steps” (which is related to the symposium we held in October 2020) with Rachel Allan and with Professor Virginia Langum (Umeå University), which was published in 2023, and “Medical Humanities, Literature and and Language” with Virginia Langum, which was published in 2022.

I have also written a chapter entitled “The language of courtroom documents” for "Volume II: Documentation, sources of data and modelling" of the forthcoming 6-volume series The New Cambridge History of the English Language. The book will be published in 2024.

A current project with Professor Erik Smitterberg (Uppsala University), is a book entitled "Corpus Linguistics for Language Change: Studying the History of English" for the Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides series, to be submitted in 2024.

Teaching and tutoring

I teach courses in subject didactics, business English, grammar, English proficiency, linguistics and language history at undergraduate level. I have also taught language history and corpus linguistics at MA and PhD level, as well as courses in pragmatics, semantics and syntax. I supervise undergraduate and MA dissertations in English linguistics, and have also supervised a number of doctoral theses in English linguistics.

Other information

I was President of SWESSE (The Swedish Society for the Study of English) for two terms, from May 2017 to April 2021.

As of January 2021 I am co-editor (with Virginia Langum) of the Nordic Journal of English Studies.