Dr Jacqueline Laws
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Honorary Fellow in Linguistics
Areas of interest
Jacqueline's research interests relate to all aspects of grammar from a constructional perspective, child language acquisition, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. Her research currently focuses on the distributional properties of complex words in spoken language and she has developed a database of 18,000 complex word types called MorphoQuantics: A Database of Derivational Morphology in Adult Spoken English.
In parallel, Jacqueline is investigating the acquisition of derivational morphology in children with normally developing language. This work has implications for research in multilingualism, literacy, education and clinical studies.
Jacqueline has also published on the characteristics of split intransitivity in Italian and Mandarin, in particular, the interaction between semantic verb class, aspect and word order effects.
Research centres and groups
Centre for Literacy & MultilingualismResearch projects
Recent projects include:
- Polysemy in verb-forming suffixation: A construction morphology approach
- Word Form Choice and Context Formality in Spoken English: 2015-2016 (funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust).