Staff Profile: Dr Jacqueline Laws

Name:

Dr Jacqueline Laws

Job Title:

Lecturer

Responsibilities:

Jacqueline supervises student dissertations at BA and MA levels and teaches the following modules:

• LS1SG: Sounds, Grammar and Meaning
• LS2EG: English Grammar
• LS3GRL: English Grammar and Lexis
• LSMGL: English Grammar and Lexis

From 2005 to 2008, Jacqueline also taught modules at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Syntax, First Language Acquisition and Research Topics in English Grammar.

Areas of interest

Jacqueline has been researching the characteristics of split intransitivity in Italian and Mandarin, in particular, the interaction between semantic verb class, aspect and word order effects.

More recently, she has been investigating the acquisition of derivational morphology in children with normally developing language.

Jacqueline has also explored attitudes of undergraduate Applied English Language students to the study of grammar; she was awarded the PGCAP Project Prize for 2008 for the experimental work that she carried out in this field.

Research groups / Centres

Language acquistion, use and processing

Publications

• Laws, J.V. & Yuan, B. (2010) 'Is the core-peripheral distinction for unaccusative verbs cross-linguistically consistent? Empirical evidence from Mandarin'. Chinese Language and Discourse, 1:2, 220-263.
• Laws, J.V. (2010) 'To 'be', and not to 'have': auxiliary selection in unaccusative verbs in Italian'. Language Studies Working Papers, University of Reading, Volume 2, 3-16.
• In preparation: 'The factors that determine the order of acquisition of derivational morphology in 2-5 year-old children with normally developing language'

Qualifications

MA in Linguistics (Reading); PhD in Psycholinguistics (London); BSc in Psychology (CNAA), PGCAP (Reading).