Presenter Biographies
Manal Alharbi
Manal Alharbi is a fourth-year PhD student in the School of English Language, Communication & Philosophy (ENCAP) at Cardiff University. She holds a BA in English language and Literature (Distinction) awarded from King Abdulaziz University/ Saudi Arabia (2001). She received an MSc in Developmental Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh (2011). Her main research interest is in how bilingual adults maintain two languages in their brain. She is currently under the supervision of Dr Michelle Aldridge-Waddon looking at the process of lexical access by adult bilinguals whose languages have different scripts namely Arabic and English.
Hamed Aljemaily
I am a third-year PhD student at Cardiff University. Currently, I am working on a project entitled “the phonological effect of Iraqi Arabic as a heritage language on Cardiff English as a native and majority language for adult heritages speakers of Arabic in Cardiff, the UK” under the supervision of Dr. Gerard O’Grady.
Reem Al Madani
Reem Al Madani is a PhD researcher in the Centre of Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. She received her B.A. in English Language and Literature from King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia and her M.A in Linguistics from the University of Jordan. Before starting her PhD, Reem worked at Effat University in Jeddah – Saudi Arabia as a Lecturer in the Visual and Digital Production Department and she was also the Director of the Management of Communication and Public Relations at the university.
Nagla Alqaedi
I am a postgraduate researcher in the Center of Language, and Communication Research (CLCR). I am funded by Saudi Electronic University, represented by the Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau in the UK. I completed a BA in English Language and Translation from Taibah University, Saudi Arabia. I completed my first MA in Teaching English as a Second Language from Gonzaga University, Washington USA (2014), and my second MA in Language and Communication Research from Cardiff University, Wales UK (2020). My Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Lise Fontaine, focuses on the use of thematised noun phrases (NPs) as a powerful instrument for creating complex and cohesive academic texts by advanced EFL learners. I am particularly interested in how learners use NPs to develop information in argumentative texts.
Nasser Alqahtani
Nasser Alqahtani is currently a PhD student at Cardiff University and is also an assistant teacher in the department of English Language at Shaqra University, Saudi Arabia. His research interests are widely within the field of discourse analysis and academic writing. However, his current topic is particularly focusing on metadiscourse markers in academic writing of MA students from Saudi Arabia and how they are compared to their counterparts in the UK.
Wael Alqahtani
I am funded by Taif University represented by Saudi Arabian Cultural Bureau in the UK in the Centre of Language and Communication Research (CLCR). I completed BA in English Linguistics and Literature from Taif university (2012), and MA from California State University-Long Beach (2016). I am interested in sentence processing from a psycholinguistics perspective and how the brain comprehends language. I am interested particularly in how L2 learners attend to morphosyntactic information when processing their L2.
Zeen Alrasheed
Zeen Al-Rasheed is a PhD student at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University, currently at her writing up stage. She got B.Sc in Management, Administration and Economic from Mosul University/Iraq. Then she got BSc and MA in English language from Salahaddin University/Erbil. Having finished her MA studies at Salahaddin University in Erbil/Iraq, she applied for the Human Capacity Development programme and has been awarded a scholarship by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq to study PhD in the English Language. In 2013 she joined Cardiff University and did the Master Taught program and in 2015 she was awarded MA degree in English Communication from the School. Her PhD study examines the significance of differences and similarities in the linguistic evaluation used by British journalists regarding ISIS’s role in the conflict taking place in Iraq and Syria.
Axel Bergstrom
My name is Axel Bergström. I’m from Sweden and have a background in speech pathology studies. I acquired my clinical speech therapy license in 2018. During my studies, I was involved in the Swedish professional association for speech and language pathologists. This gave me insight to challenges that speech therapists face on a national level, one of which was communication interventions for people living with dementia. I quickly became interested and wanted to know more, which led me to Cardiff where I am now fortunate enough to research this very interesting topic full time.
Charlotte Bourgoin
Charlotte Bourgoin is currently conducting a joint PhD between KU Leuven and the University of Cardiff under the supervision of Kristin Davidse, Karen Lahousse and Gerard O’Grady. Her PhD research is concerned with the cross-linguistic comparison of specificational cleft constructions, in their full and reduced forms, in English and French. Her study seeks to identify the different meanings and functions coded by the grammar and prosody of full vs. reduced clefts. Her research interests include discourse analysis with a cross-linguistic approach, and the study of prosody in relation with information structure.
Débora Cabral
Débora Cabral has a B.A. in History, another degree in Portuguese Language and Literature teaching, an M.A. in Discourse Analysis from the University of Brasilia, Brazil. At Cardiff University, she graduated her MA with distinction and is on the 2nd year of her PhD in Language and Communication Research with focus on Forensic Linguistics. Teaching Linguistics to first-year undergrads in a Law Department in Brazil, she came across the analysis of legal genres, which led her to Forensic Linguistics. She investigates the language of judicial activism, through the lenses of sociocognitive critical approach to discourse studies and corpus linguistics.
Alex Carr
Alex Carr is a postgraduate researcher at Cardiff University in the Centre of Language and Communication Research (CLCR). His research interests include categorization, lexical semantics and functional grammar, with a particular focus on the classification of nominality and the expression of event semantics in nominal form. His PhD thesis, supervised by Lise Fontaine, proposes to expand our conception of the nature and degree of nominality, through exploring how nominals express temporal semantics, with specific attention provided to underived event nominals, i.e. nouns which express event semantics which have not derived from a verb, e.g. storm, fire, death.
Matthew Coombes
Following completion of degrees in Music, Design and Digital Animation, I discovered my passion for linguistics through the works of JRR Tolkien – specifically his invented languages. This encouraged a further degree (Linguistics) at De Montfort, which gave me the opportunity to discover just how influential aesthetics have become in modern day communication. This concluded with the publishing of my first book, The Elvish Writing Systems of JRR Tolkien – the content for which required a significant amount of research through collaborative contact of like-minded scholars. From this point, a PhD was a logical progression in further establishing my work.
Aurora Goodwin
After completing her undergraduate degree in English Language at Cardiff University, Aurora studied a MA in Language and Communication Research, formulating a special interest in Twitter communication as a means of demonstrating stance. Her PhD thesis, supervised by Dr. Tereza Spilioti, focusses upon how Twitter disinformation accounts, active around the 2016 US Presidential Election, used linguistic resources to authenticate identity performances. She intends to investigate impersonations of American citizens by focussing upon the identity aspects presented in their naming strategies and profile pictures, and how the framing of news events indexed group affiliation.
Kateryna Krykoniuk
Kateryna Krykoniuk is a fourth-year PhD Student in the School of English, Communication and Philosophy at Cardiff University. She holds BPhil and MPhil with distinction from Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine). Her main theoretical interest concerns morphology, and, in particular, word formation. She investigates morphological regularities and patterns that govern the organization of morphemes in word formation processes of various languages and how the meaning of morpheme correlates with their form. Kateryna also works on creating a large morphological meta-corpus of contemporary English. She is an author of a few articles on formal morphology: Word Formation Patterns and Lexical Capacity of Parts of Speech (on Typology of the Persian and Slavic Languages) (Kyiv, 2014), Statistical and Morphological Regularities in Persian Word Formation (Tambov, 2014), A Study of the Persian Morphological Structure by Applying Formal Morphological Analysis (Tehran, 2014), Predictive modelling of Type Valency in Word Formation Grammar (under review).
Mihaila Lukic
I studied criminology at BA level and applied linguistics at MA level, so was keen to conduct a research project that combined the two fields. Following two small scale studies of the language of police interviews as part of my MA, I developed an interest in gaining a better understanding of how language is used to (co-)construct identity in this context. I particularly wanted to discover how these interviews are carried out when the participants share a key aspect of their identity, i.e. they are both police officers. This interest was broadened to include narrative (co-)construction, which led me to the specific topic of my PhD research.
Elisa Ramírez Pérez
Elisa Ramírez Pérez is a final year PhD candidate at Cardiff University and University of Bristol specialising in English historical linguistics. More specifically, her PhD project is studying processes of verbal morphology simplification in the late Northumbrian dialect of Old English, focusing mainly on the historical evolution of weak verbs class II. This project stems from a preliminary study Elisa carried out as part of her MPhil thesis at the University of Cambridge in 2017. Prior to this, Elisa completed a BA in English Language and Literature at the University of Westminster (London) where she discovered her passion for historical linguistics. She is also a huge fan of the Bard and all things Shakespeare.
Lisa Pomfrett
I am a part time student who began their PhD in October 2017. I have an interest in institutional language and the application of corpus linguistics methodologies. I have worked in the higher education sector in non-academic roles for over 10 years and this experience has influenced my research.
Tamara Tarchichi
Tamara Tarchichi is currently an international student doing her PhD in Language and Communication at Cardiff University. Motivated by her experience as a university English writing instructor in Canada, Tamara’s research investigates the use of the semicolon mark in L1 English students’ academic writing using corpus linguistics. Tamara believes that synthesising a linguistic account of semicolon use from corpus data like the BAWE corpus will be valuable in realising students’ frequency of use of the semicolon and in comparing what style manuals prescribe versus what happens in the academic classroom.
Stephanie Tilliridou
Stephanie Tilliridou is a part-time PhD student in Language and Communication at Cardiff University. She is a part-time distance learner based in Cyprus. At the same time, she is a Director and English Language teacher at a Language Institute in Cyprus.
Before pursuing her PhD at Cardiff University, Stephanie Tilliridou obtained a BA in English Language and English Language Teaching from the University of Sussex and an MA in Education and Professional Studies from King’s College London. Her current doctoral research focuses on how older Facebook users use semiotic and linguistic features to project different online identities on Facebook wall posts.
Sabrina Toumi
Sabrina Toumi is a PhD student at Cardiff University in the Centre of Language and Communication Research (CLCR) where she is also a PGR tutor. Before pursuing her PhD, Sabrina obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Hons, Distinction) in Linguistics and English for Specific Purposes from Mouloud Mammeri University of Tizi-Ouzou in Algeria and successfully completed a Master of Arts in Language and Communication. Her doctoral project focuses on the use of figurative devices (metaphor, metonymy, and irony) in socio-political contexts where the life and professional career of political cartoonists are at risk.
Katharine Young
Before coming to Cardiff University, Katharine was a 2nd language Welsh teacher and has always been interested in different varieties of the language in different settings. She’s funded by the ESRC and Welsh Government and works both under ENCAP and the School of Welsh. In 2019, she completed an MA in Language and Communication, looking at teacher perceptions of pupil variation. Her PhD looks at the effect of home language on stylistic variation. She has just completed a 5-month internship at Welsh Government working on a research project mapping the provision of late immersion education in Wales.