TICLAUS
Transitivity in Courtroom Language: A Unified Solution
Who We Are
Leanne Bartley
University of Granada
Leanne began working in academia in 2008 at Jaén University (Spain). Since then, she has worked at Liverpool Hope University (UK), Swansea University (UK) and Granada University (Spain) for both teaching and research purposes. In 2020, Leanne was awarded a 3-year Marie Curie Global Fellowship by the European Commission and is currently based between Granada University (Spain), Cardiff University (UK) and Simon Fraser University (Canada) working on her postdoctoral research. Her areas of research include Critical Discourse Analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics and Forensic Linguistics, with her interest lying heavily in analysing language to expose miscarriages of justice within the legal system.
Maite Taboada
Simon Fraser University
I am a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and an Associate Member of the Cognitive Science Program and the School of Computing Science. I am a linguist working at the intersection of discourse analysis and computational linguistics. In discourse
analysis, I study the mechanisms for coherence in discourse, focusing on how links across sentences produce the impression of coherence in text and speech. In computational linguistics, I develop methods and algorithms to process and exploit discourse structure in different applications, especially for sentiment analysis. Current research projects involve analyses of online comments, with the goal of building a moderation platform to feature constructive comments more prominently; and a study of the language of misinformation, using text classification techniques to distinguish ‘fake’ and fact-based news stories. My lab is also collaborating with Informed Opinions. Together, we have built the Gender Gap Tracker, an online tool to track the number of men and women quoted in Canadian mainstream news media.
Encarnacion Hidalgo Tenorio
University of Granada
I am a Professor in English linguistics at the University of Granada, Spain, and I have devoted to studying the use of language in contexts such as literature (especially Irish theatre), politics and the media. During over 25 years now, I have combined my academic interest in the relationship between language and gender, corpus-based critical discourse analysis, and key concepts developed within the framework of systemic-functional linguistics such as transitivity, modality and appraisal. My aim is to identify and understand the strategies used by speakers when it comes to representing their inner and outer worlds, the social actors to which they refer, and thus finally build their own identity and their construal of others’. All of this has been successfully developed thanks to my participation and direction of several research projects from 2007 to 2022. I have also published a significant number of works in which I have used computer tools such as AntConc, Wmatrix, Wordsmith Tools or UAM CorpusTool to discover lexical, syntagmatic and evaluative patterns present in texts of all kinds. Thanks to the latter, I have been able to observe how power and solidarity are established verbally between the people who are active communicators, as well as the trace of veiled intentions in the linguistic expressions we weave together in our discursive performances. In the medium and long term, I plan to delve into the aspects mentioned above, combine qualitative with quantitative methods, and try to unravel some ins and outs of multimodal communication at the same time that I continue endorsing transdisciplinarity. My team includes people from different places and with very different expertise such as political scientists, computer engineers, psychiatrists and discourse analysts. From 2017 onwards, we have been working on “Nutcracker”, an algorithm designed to detect sentiment and to monitor extremism.
Lise Fontaine
Cardiff University
Lise Fontaine is a Reader at Cardiff University. She lectures mainly on functional grammar, word meaning, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Her research interests include functional grammar theory and, more specifically, the study of referring expressions. Currently she is leading the NaMeD research project (Nominality and Meaning Directness), which includes contrastive work on the semantic representations in the noun-verb continuum. In particular, she is interested in developing the concept of meaning potential in relation to lexis.
Michelle Aldridge-Waddon
Cardiff University
Michelle Aldridge is a Reader at Cardiff University. She lectures on psycholinguistics including communication disorders and child language acquisition and on forensic linguistics. Her research interests lie in the communicative experiences of vulnerable people including children with typical & atypical development, adults with a learning disability and rape victims. Her current research projects comprise nurse-nurse interactions during ward handover meetings, police interactions with victims of domestic abuse, community interactions using alternative & augmentative communication and creating easy read documents for prisoners. She is co-editor of the volume: Empirical evidences and theoretical assumptions in functional linguistics (Routledge 2021). She has written widely in journals such as cognitive linguistics, forensic linguistics, health and communication and language awareness.
Tom Bartlett
Cardiff University
I am Professor of Functional Applied Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. My research areas are discourse analysis, Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the sociodynamics of language. In discourse analysis I focus particularly on the concepts of voice, cultural capital and power and the ways in which issues of sustainability are discussed and negotiated between different social and professional groups. In Systemic Functional Linguistics I specialise in the study of textuality and informational structure across languages, with a focus on Scottish Gaelic. I am codirector of the interdisciplinary research centre Discourses of Sustainability at the University of Glasgow and a founding organiser of the Roundtable on Communicative Dynamism as well as the LinC Summer School in SFL, for which I regularly present classes on Advanced Transitivity.
Lucas Chambers
Simon Fraser University
I am a graduate student of linguistics at Simon Fraser University. My research interests lie in Systemic Functional Linguistics and political discourse. I am interested especially in populist rhetoric and what information is presented as given or assumed and what information is presented as new or informative.