About the LinC Research Network

The Research Network for Linguistics in Cardiff (LinC) was created in 2009 to provide a forum and resource for linguistics research at Cardiff University and in particular for researchers interested in Systemic Functional Linguistics. The LinC network holds monthly meetings which provide a forum for the exchange of information and ideas with respect to our individual and joint research projects and to offer support in developing and furthering our understanding of Systemic Functional Linguistics.

Interested in doing a PhD with us?

We have a number of vacancies for new PhD students on our Language and Communication (PhD) programme and we are particularly keen to encourage topics in areas related to one or more of the following: Systemic Functional linguistics, Phonology and Intonation, Corpus Linguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Discourse, and Sociolinguistics. Explore our postgraduate research pages for more information about studying with us.

We are also keen to welcome visits from other researchers interested in working on Systemic Functional linguistics and related areas.If you would like to visit us on our Visiting Scholars programme, please find out more on this page.

About the Co-Founders and co-organisers

Lise Fontaine is a Reader in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University (Wales) where she has worked since 2004.  She lectures mainly on functional grammar, word meaning, corpus linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Her research interests include functional linguistics broadly and, more specifically, the study of referring expressions as realised in the noun phrase. In addition to grammatical analysis and theory, she is also interested in language processing.  Her work tends to explore complementary methods such as corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. She is the author of Analyzing English Grammar: A systemic-functional introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and with K. Jones and D. Schönthal, Referring in Language: An integrated approach (CUP, in press). She has co-edited Systemic Functional Linguistics: Exploring Choice (CUP, 2013), Choice in Language (Equinox, 2013) and the Oxford Companion to the English Language with T. McArthur and J. Lam-McArthur (Oxford University Press) Among others. She has been active in offering literacy support training to teachers in functional grammar and raising language awareness.

Gerard O’Grady is a Professor in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Prior to completing his PhD in Discourse Intonation at Birmingham, for many years he worked at various universities in Japan where he taught a range of courses focusing on pronunciation, functional approaches to grammar and critical reading of news texts. He has also worked at Swansea University as a lecturer where he taught courses on sociolinguistics, dialectology and language origins. His chief research interest lies in exploring the communicative functions of intonation: notably how intonation is used in conjunction with syntactic cues to help segment the speech signal into semantic units analogous to the orthographic units of clause, sentence and paragraph, and how tonality and tonicity choices project information as given or new. He obtained full funding £6133 from the journal Language Learning to host a multi-institution Round Table “New Theoretical Perspectives above below and across the clause” on September 4 and 5 2014 at Cardiff University.