Current PhD students

Read about the theses and research interests of some of our current PhD students in Linguistics and English Language.

  • Mr Samer Ahmed 'Xerbi Kurmanji: A morphosyntactic and structural analysis' (supervised by Eva Schultze-Berndt and Andrew Koontz-Garboden).
  • Ms Shatha Alahmadi 'A comparative investigation of the semantics-phonology interface: Focus-sensitive particles in Hijazi Arabic and English' (supervised by Martina Faller and Vera Hohaus).
  • Ms Sadie Barlow 'Lexical Chunks and the Nature of Idiolects’ (supervised by Andrea Nini and Edoardo Manino).
  • Ms Matilde Basilicati ‘Individual language change across a lifespan. Using Authorship Analysis to investigate the degree of stability in a person’s idiolect’ (supervised by Andrea Nini and Dmitry Nikolaev).
  • Ms Eda Bicici 'Identifying Drivers of Language Development in Children’s Interactions' (supervised by Colin Bannard, Dmitry Nikolaev, Penny Levickis [Uni Melbourne], Hannah Stark [Uni Melbourne], and Danielle Matthews [Uni Sheffield]).
  • Ms Marijn Boomars 'Motivations and Mechanisms for Lexical Change: A Case Study of Antonymic Adjectives in English and Dutch' (supervised by Tine Breban and Eva Schultze-Berndt).
  • Mr Oliver Credland 'Acquisition of future and conditional tenses: A comparison of English, French, Spanish and Catalan' (supervised by Delia Bentley and Thea Cameron Faulkner).
  • Ms Alice Eddyshaw 'Speaker identity and the resolution of linguistic ambiguity' (supervised by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Wendell Kimper).
  • Mr Michael Green 'Non-finite complementation in Estonian' (supervised by Delia Bentley and Tine Breban).
  • Mr Thomas Hales 'Large Language Models for Authorship Analysis’ (supervised by Andrea Nini and Dmitry Nikolaev).
  • Mr Changxin Ke 'The Semantics of Mandarin Decomposition Adverbs' (supervised by Martina Faller and Andrew Koontz-Garboden).
  • Ms Xinling Ke 'Epistemic and deontic rights in online medical consultations' (supervised by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Leigh Harrington).
  • Mr Piroon Piyamahapong 'Dative Alternations in Thai' (supervised by Tine Breban and Eva Schultze-Berndt).
  • Ms Zhiyao Ren 'Cross-linguistic transfer in multilinguals' spatial expression: A typological and developmental study in Tibetan, Chinese and English' (supervised by Eva Schultze-Berndt and Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen).
  • Ms Chuting Song 'Clickbait on Weibo. A Cognitive-Pragmatic Analysis of Internet Language Deception' (visiting PGR student 2025–26, supervised by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen).
  • Ms Eve Suharwardy 'A Study of Temporal Comparison in English and Malay' (supervised by Vera Hohaus and Andrew Koontz-Garboden).
  • Ms Siena Weingartz 'The Interaction between Gradability and Modality: The View from Ndebele and Afrikaans' (supervised by Vera Hohaus and Andrew Koontz-Garboden).
  • Ms Yunjia Wen 'Investigating the Comprehension of Conversational Implicatures and Motivation among English as a Second Language Speakers' (supervised by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen & Julio Villa Garcia).
  • Ms Baoyi Zeng 'Can a robot impersonate a human? Studying machines’ ability to mimic linguistic identity’ (supervised by Andrea Nini and Dmitry Nikolaev).