Language & Social Change

In my research, I explore the role of language in social change. I ask how new experiences and categories are named and framed; how existing ones are (re)negotiated; and how communities and institutions use language for these purposes.

I am particularly interested in linguistic innovation related to gender. I don’t treat new forms as isolated features of a linguistic system; rather, I see them as multidimensional objects (Cabré, 2021), a significant part of broader discursive and social practices.

I approach these questions cross-linguistically and cross-culturally, working with Polish, Spanish and English, and occasionally Portuguese.

Where it started

My current work stems from a question that I have been asking ever since I entered academia: how does language mediate between the world around us and the ways we understand it?

My PhD explored this question through a Polish-Spanish study of linguistic worldviews of death, their literary reconfiguration in Federico García Lorca’s poetry, and their reconstruction in Polish translation.

I have since shifted my focus towards more social dimensions: how do meanings and categories come into being; how do they change; and how are they (re)negotiated by communities and institutions across languages and cultures?

gender, linguistic innovation and social change

I currently focus on lexical and grammatical innovation around gender, which I see as particularly useful lenses through which to observe changes in social norms.

My work moves between bottom-up innovation, such as trans language or activist discourse, and institutional responses to linguistic change: parliamentary language, institutional guidelines and language policies.

I believe that observing these two contexts can be particularly revealing not only of how these new forms are coined and subsequently adopted or contested, but also of the values and emotions that contribute to their legitimisation or rejection.

METHODS AND APPROACHES

I mostly work at the intersection of corpus linguistics and discourse studies, namely corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS). I also use qualitative discourse and document analysis, as well as lexical and semantic analysis, primarily from a cross-linguistic perspective. Recently, I’ve been working on LGBTQ+ terminology, adopting a socioterminological approach.

I combine quantitative and qualitative data that I extract, classify, and interpret both manually and using computationally assisted methods. I take great joy in observing how patterns identified through quantitative corpus methods can guide close contextual analysis, and how, in turn, qualitative interpretation can inform the categories and questions used in quantitative analysis.

Tools I work with include: Sketch Engine and other corpus/concordance tools, Taguette for qualitative coding, Excel for data organisation and analysis.

WHAT’S NEXT?

I plan to continue exploring the discursive functions of linguistic innovation, particularly across (digital) communities with opposing political and ideological positions. I’m mostly interested in similarities in the functions that such new language perform.

I’m also increasingly interested in discourses on knowledge production and assessment. I want to explore how ideas such as excellence, quality and impact are constructed, whose knowledge is recognised as excellent, and how research assessment and the growing marketisation of academia influence what knowledge is produced and made visible.

Methodologically, I want to keep expanding beyond my current corpus and discourse toolkit. I am looking forward to engaging more closely with sociological theory and methods as they can help me better understand and situate my findings on the roles of linguistic innovation and discourses on knowledge.