English

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Anastasia Novoselova

Online product reviews have become an important factor in consumers’ purchase decisions (Krishnamoorthy, 2015; Vasquez, 2014; Zhang et al., 2014). In fact, according to some studies, online reviews have been shown to have a greater influence on purchase decisions than formal product descriptions by the manufacturer. The phenomenon has been a focus of research in diverse fields, such as marketing and tourism management, which studied the correlation between the scores and the sentiment expressed in reviews and product sales (Jurafsky et al., 2014), the effect of reviews on potential customers’ trust perceptions (Cheng et al., 2019), and identification of fake reviews (Hu et al., 2011). In corpus linguistics research, consumer reviews have been studied from the perspective of their genre characteristics (Pollach, 2006), rhetorical strategies (Skalicky, 2013), use of stance and metadiscourse markers (Zou & Hyland, 2022) and evaluative features (Virtanen, 2017; Chik & Taboada, 2020). This project will aim to determine discoursal characteristics of helpful product reviews obtained from online retail websites such as Amazon and Booking.com, using methods of corpus linguistics.

References

X. Cheng, S. Fu, J. Sun, A. Bilgihan, and F. Okumus, ‘An Investigation on Online Reviews in Sharing Economy Driven Hospitality Platforms: A Viewpoint of Trust’, Tourism management, 71 (2019), 366–77.

S. Chik and M. Taboada, ‘Generic Structure and Rhetorical Relations of Online Book Reviews in English, Japanese and Chinese’, Contrastive Pragmatics, 1 (2020), 143–79.

N. Hu, I. Bose, Yu Gao, and L. Liu, ‘Manipulation in Digital Word-of-mouth: A Reality Check for Book Reviews’, Decision Support Systems, 50:3 (2011), 627–35.

D. Jurafsky, V. Chahuneau, B. Routledge, and N. Smith, ‘Narrative Framing of Consumer Sentiment in Online Restaurant Reviews’, First Monday, 19:4 (2014).

S. Krishnamoorthy, ‘Linguistic Features for Review Helpfulness Prediction’, Expert Systems with Applications, 42:7 (2015), 3751–759.

I. Pollach, ‘Electronic Word of mouth: A Genre Analysis of Product Reviews on Consumer Opinion Web Sites’, System Sciences, 2006. HICSS’06, Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, vol. 3 (2006).

S. Skalicky, ‘Was this Analysis Helpful? A Genre Analysis of the Amazon.com Discourse Community and Its “Most Helpful” Product Reviews’, Discourse, Context and Media, 2 (2013), 84–93.

C. Vásquez, ‘“Usually not one to complain but...”: Constructing Identities in User-generated Online Reviews’, in The Language of Social Media: Identity and Community on the Internet, ed. by P. Seargeant and C. Tagg (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

T. Virtanen, ‘Adaptability in Online Consumer Reviews: Exploring Genre Dynamics and Interactional Choices’, Journal of Pragmatics, 116 (2017), 77–90.

K. Zhang, S. Zhao, C. Cheung, and M. Lee, ‘Examining the Influence of Online Reviews on Consumers' Decision-making: A Heuristic–Systematic Model’, Decision Support Systems, 67 (2014), 78–89.

H. Zou, and K. Hyland, ‘How the Medium Shapes the Message: Stance in Two Forms of Book Reviews’, Journal of Pragmatics, 193 (2022), 269–80.

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Rob Francis and Dr Kerry Hadley-Pryce

Geopoetics is a flourishing but critically overlooked methodology for creative writers, and can act as an important way of reconsidering and remapping the places we call home and the layers of the landscape that enable our cultures and communities. It considers place, and being within place, as more than merely a dot on the map, but as a vibrant and complex web of interactions between disparate ideas, movements and materials. Stratigraphic Streams will be a creative writing research project that seeks to explore these layers and interactions and to further develop Geopoetic processes and definitions

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Rob Francis and Dr Kerry Hadley-Pryce

The post-industrial West Midlands is a space rich with what Mark Fisher might refer to as Weird and Eerie. Its mix of rural and urban sites and its porous borders make for decidedly liminal geographies, while the relics and ruins of industry haunt in fascinating ways. The research for this project will interrogate this unique and unusual spirit of place through cutting-edge creative writing practice and consider the ways the region opens up possibilities for contemporary speculative fiction.

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Esther Asprey

Dialect formation has been investigated in the UK context in Milton Keynes (Kerswill and Williams 2000, 2005), Corby (Dyer 2002) and Livingston (Pollner 1987; Robinson 2005). Typical findings are that the dialect young speakers converge on is often slightly different from that of the first generation of incomers. In Milton Keynes for example, Scots variants were missing from the speech of the first generation born there. Additionally, young speakers often do not converge on the existing variety (Buckinghamshire traditional dialect, in the case of Milton Keynes). Instead what emerges is often a koine form which is created by the first generation born in the location and becomes a target for subsequent generations. Dawley New Town was designated as an overspill new town for the West Midlands region post WW2, but neither its hinterland of Shropshire nor the emergent variety now spoken there have been investigated empirically. This study will collect stratified data along different axes of formality from three generations of Telford speakers, using an extant data set collected from the neighbouring region of Ironbridge to inform the study in terms of the variety that did exist in Dawley prior to the building of the New Town. In this way we shall investigate to what extent a new variety has formed and to what extent Telford might have come to be perceived as an extension of its West Midlands neighbour, the Black Country.

References

J. Dyer, ‘We all speak the same round here’: Dialect Levelling in a Scottish-English Community’. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 6 (2002), 99-116.

Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams, ‘New Towns and Koineization: Linguistic and Social Correlates’, Linguistics, 43:5 (2005), pp. 1023–48.

Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams, ‘Creating a New Town Koine: Children and Language Change in Milton Keynes’, Language in Society 29:1 (2000), 65–115.

C. Pollner, ‘“It’s a Comical Langnnge”: Attitudes Toward Scots and English in a Scottish New Town’, Journal of English Linguistics, 20:1 (1987), 72–88.

C. Robinson, ‘Changes in the dialect of Livingston’. Language and Literature, 14:2 (2005), 181-193.

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Esther Asprey

Black Country dialect developed as an enregistered variety (Agha 2005) with the advent of increased industrialization on the borders of South Staffordshire and North Worcestershire. Newspaper articles, broadsheet song lyrics and naive spellings in personal documents attest to the existence of the variety (Asprey 2020). At the same time, a rise in school attendance, concomitant increased literacy levels and the focused standardization of English pushed the domains in which dialect use in England was possible to the margins. This project looks across glossaries of the dialect made under the aegis of Joseph Wright and the English Dialect Society (1898-1905) and compares former reports about the use of of these words with current knowledge among the Black Country speech community to clarify the extent to which active use and passive knowledge of words formerly recognized as linked to the Black Country region and linguistic variety is declining. Current discourses around the position of regional dialects in England have not agreed on their vitality and this project provides a vital diachronic and synchronic contribution to this knowledge base.

References

A. Agha, ‘Voice, Footing, Enregisterment’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 15:1 (2005), 38–59.

Esther Asprey, ‘Black Country Dialect Literature and What It Can Tell Us about Black Country Dialect’. Dialect Writing and the North of England, edited by Patrick Honeybone and Warren Maguire (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 29-50.

Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, parts 1–6 (Oxford: Henry Frowde, 1898–1905)

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Aidan Byrne

Proposals are invited addressing the relationships between the literatures of the Four Nations of the UK and the Republic of Ireland in English, Cymraeg, and Gaeilge from the early modern period onwards. What are the key generic, formal, and subject-led influences on each other, and how did innovation spread across the nations and their languages? How have the literatures of the Five Nations converged and diverged since Irish independence (1922) and Scottish and Welsh devolution in the early 21st-century?

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Aidan Byrne

Politicians from dictators to backbench MPs have written creatively since Chaucer, and more extensively in the modern era, from Napoleon to Stalin and Boris Johnson. PhD proposals exploring the sociological, anthropological, and literary contexts of politicians’ creative writing are welcomed. Key questions include the relationship between creative and political imaginations; the possibility of predicting social change through the concerns raised in politicians fictions; the relationship between politicians non-fictional and fictional works; the construction of central topics (Europe, democracy, identity, sexuality, gender etc.) in such work; the impact of generic choices on subject matter; the sociology of politician-authors and their access to the market.

Supervisors / contacts: Dr Aidan Byrne

Proposals are invited in the field of Environmental Humanities, Eco-fiction, Blue Humanities, and Climate Fiction, exploring the development of environmental perspectives in any field of modern and contemporary literature and theory.