Cardiff School of English Communication and Philosophy

Language, Identities and Interpersonal Communication

What roles do language and discourse play in defining individuals and social groups? What light do different research methods shed on relationships between social groups? How are identities ‘performed’ and manipulated in social interaction? Our research takes a broad view of these and other sociolinguistic issues.

One recently completed project, funded by the Economic & Social Research Council (ESRC), is British Media Images: Elderly People in UK Advertising, investigated by Angie Williams and Virpi Ylänne. Another, British Academy-funded, on Editorial Cartoons and Geopolitical Perceptions, has also just been completed by Lisa El Refaie in collaboration with Kathrin Hoerschelmann (Durham University). New projects under development include a linguistic ethnography of the older worker, an evaluative project on the impact of new anti-ageist legislation on workplace discourse, and a project investigating young people’s consumption of media texts on the subject of military conflict.

Key publications by our staff in Language, identities and interpersonal communication include:

• Bell and N.Coupland (eds.), Journal of Sociolinguistics
• J.Coupland and Gwyn (eds.), Discourse, the Body and Identity (2003, Palgrave Macmillan)
• J.Coupland (ed.), Small Talk (2000, Pearson Longman)
• N.Coupland, Style: Language Variation and Identity (2007, Cambridge University Press)N.Coupland, Sociolinguistics and Theory (in preparation, Cambridge University Press)
• N.Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin (eds.), Sociolinguistics and Social Theory (2001, Pearson Longman)
• Garrett, N.Coupland, and Williams, Investigating Language Attitudes: Social Meanings of Dialect, Ethnicity and Performance (2003, University of Wales Press)
• Jaworski, N.Coupland and Galasinski (eds.), Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives. (2004, Mouton de Gruyter)

PhD research in language, identities and interpersonal communication

Some staff have supervision vacancies for PhD research in areas related to Language, Identities and Intergroup Relations, including:

• Sociolinguistics
• Language and communication of and about older people
• Language of and about children
• Representations of identity and citizenship in news discourse
• Communication in language-disabled groups
• Intergroup attitudes
• Persuasive communication
• Visual/multimodal forms of persuasion and metaphor
• Intergenerational communication
• News media portrayals of generational groups
• Tourist-host interaction
• Identity performance
• Service encounter discourse