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Dr Andreas Buerki

Dr Andreas Buerki

Senior Lecturer

Email
buerkia@cardiff.ac.uk
Telephone
+44 (0)29 2087 4504
Campuses
3.29, John Percival Building, Colum Drive, Cardiff, CF10 3EU
Welsh speaking
Users
Available for postgraduate supervision

Overview

I am a member of the Centre for Language and Communication Research.

I am principally a corpus linguist and phraseologist, looking at how language as used by speakers and writers in real contexts works. My work is mainly theoretical and of a broadly usage-based, cognitive linguistic outlook, employing a constructionist approach to linguistic structure.

My particular research interest is in the various aspects of formulaic language (common turns of phrase, phraseology) and in the social and cultural nature of language and how this shows in linguistic structure, language change and in other areas such as public discourses.

Currently, I serve as the vice-president of EUROPHRAS, the European Society of Phraseology, and I am a founding member of the 'Cardiff Corpus Network' of corpus linguists at Cardiff. I am also a member of the Digital Cultures Network at Cardiff and a member of the Editorial Board of Cardiff University Press.

I convene the Linguistics Pathway of the ESRC Wales Doctoral Training Partnership and am the Subject Director of Postgraduate Research at the Centre for Language and Communication Research. I am also a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and a member of Cardiff University's Academi Gymraeg.

Before coming to Cardiff I taught at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and previously also at the University of the West of England, the University of Basel, as well as Korea University and Gwangju University.

Biography

I received my BA from Brunel University and my MA in Linguistics from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS, University of London). Thereafter, I worked as a lecturer in English Language at Gwangju University and Korea University, both in the Republic of Korea, before starting my PhD research at the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 2008. I received my PhD in General Linguistics from the University of Basel in 2013. Subsequently, I was a part-time lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) at the University of Basel and post-doctoral researcher and part-time lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin before teaching part-time at Cardiff University and the University of the West of England well as being a post-doc reseacher at Cardiff University. I became a full-time lecturer at Cardiff University in 2015 and a Senior Lecturer in 2019.

Professional memberships

Publications

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Teaching

At undergraduate level, most years I convene and teach the third year module 'Phraseology in Theory and Application' (SE1421) as well as convening and teaching on the modules 'How Language Works 1' (SE1113) and 'How Language Works 2' (SE1114) which are introductory modules to the study of language.

At postgraduate level, I teach the MA module on Quantitative Research Methods in linguistics (SET013), as well as blocks on forensic authorship attribution as part of the Forensic Linguistics 2 module (SET002).

Further, I have taught 'Introduction to UNIX/Linux' at Cardiff University's doctoral academy and the 'Introduction to Statistics Workshop' at the School of English, Commuication and Philosophy.

In the past, I have taught parts of a module on 'Reading and Writing in the Digital Age' (SE1112) as well as modules on Second Language Acquisition and various introductory and advanced linguistics courses on syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, phonetics and phonology as well as workshops on corpus-linguistic, computational linguistic and statistics topics.

My primary research interests include:

  • formulaic language, phraseology and constructionist approaches to grammar
  • corpus linguistic and quantitative approaches to linguistic research, including computational methods
  • recent and ongoing change and motivation in linguistic change
  • language, culture and society, particularly social and cultural aspects of linguistic structure
  • discourse analysis in particular in relation to phraseology and linguistic relativity

Currently, I am working on how societal discourses can be read via their phraseology (see interview here), change in linguistic constructions over short periods of time and authorship attribution, among other topics.

My work on social and cultural motivation of language change in the area of Formulaic Language has recently appeared in the monograph 'Formulaic Language and Linguistic Change: A data-led approach', published by Cambridge University Press.

Previously, I was the sole investigator of an SNSF-funded project on the universality of formulaic language. This project looked at how formulaic language manifests itself in languages of morphologically different type using a 30-million word corpus of Wikipedia texts.

Supervision

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD students who are interested in working in the areas of:

  • Phraseology / Formulaic Language
  • Construction Grammar
  • Language and Culture, incl. linguistic relativity
  • Language change
  • Authorship attribution
  • other corpus linguistic topics with a quantitative element

I do not supervise work on purely applied topics without an important theoretical aspect, such as work proposing to investigate purely applied issues in language teaching.

Past projects

Areas of expertise

Related news

New study reveals how social and cultural change are the key drivers in how our language is changing

What our phraseology tells us about language change

20 April 2020

External profiles