Dr Jacqueline Laws
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Honorary Fellow in Linguistics
Areas of interest
Jacqueline's research interests relate to all aspects of grammar from a constructional perspective, child language acquisition, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. Her research currently focuses on the distributional properties of complex words in spoken language and she has developed a database of 18,000 complex word types called MorphoQuantics: A Database of Derivational Morphology in Adult Spoken English.
In parallel, Jacqueline is investigating the acquisition of derivational morphology in children with normally developing language. This work has implications for research in multilingualism, literacy, education and clinical studies.
Jacqueline has also published on the characteristics of split intransitivity in Italian and Mandarin, in particular, the interaction between semantic verb class, aspect and word order effects.
Research centres and groups
Centre for Literacy & MultilingualismResearch projects
Recent projects include:
- Polysemy in verb-forming suffixation: A construction morphology approach
- Word Form Choice and Context Formality in Spoken English: 2015-2016 (funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust).
Background
Jacqueline was formerly the Director of, and Admissions Tutor for, the PhD Programmes in Applied Linguistics, and taught modules on Grammar at undergraduate and postgraduate level. She also delivered modules on research design at doctoral level and supervised a number of PhD students, but ceased to take on further supervision in July 2019.Academic qualifications
MA in Linguistics (Reading); PhD in Psycholinguistics (London); BA (Hons) Italian (London), BSc (Hons) Psychology (CNAA), Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice (Reading), Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).Awards and honours
In 2012, Jacqueline won a University Award for Outstanding Contributions to Teaching and Learning.Publications
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Laws, J.
ORCID: 0000-0001-7275-116X
,
Attwood, A.
,
Treffers-Daller, J.
ORCID: 0000-0002-6575-6736
(2022)
Unlearning the boundary-crossing constraint: Processing Instruction and the acquisition of motion event construal.
International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching
, 60
(4).
pp.
1089-1118.
ISSN:
1613-4141
|
doi:
https://dx.doi.org/10.1515/iral-2020-0147
- Alangari, M. , Jaworska, S. , Laws, J. (2020) Who’s afraid of phrasal verbs? The use of phrasal verbs in expert academic writing in the discipline of linguistics. Journal of English for Academic Purposes , 43 ISSN: 1475-1585 | doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2019.100814
- Treffers-Daller, J. , Alkhudiry, R. , Laws, J. (2019) Using the YARC Secondary with adult Arabic L1 learners of English: an exploration of L2 learners’ reading comprehension and their ability to learn new words. Language Studies Working Papers , 10 pp. 3-16. ISSN: 2040-3461
- Laws, J. (2019) Profiling complex word usage in the speech of English preschool children: frequency patterns and transparency characteristics. First Language , 39 (6). pp. 593-617. ISSN: 0142-7237 | doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0142723719872669
- Laws, J. and Ryder, C. (2018) Register variation in spoken British English: the case of verb-forming suffixation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 23 (1). pp. 1-27. ISSN: 1569-9811 | doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.16036.law
- Laws, J. , Ryder, C. , Jaworska, S. (2017) A diachronic corpus-based study into the effects of age and gender on the usage patterns of verb-forming suffixation in spoken British English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics , 22 (3). pp. 375-402. ISSN: 1569-9811 | doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.3.04law
- Laws, J. and Ryder, C. (2014) Getting the measure of derivational morphology in adult speech a corpus analysis using MorphoQuantics. Language Studies Working Papers , 6 pp. 3-17. ISSN: 2040-3461
- Laws, J. (2010) To 'be', and not to 'have': auxiliary selection in unaccusative verbs in Italian . Language Studies Working Papers , 2 pp. 3-16. ISSN: 2040-3461
- Laws, J. and Yuan, B. (2010) Is the core-peripheral distinction for unaccusative verbs cross-linguistically consistent? Empirical evidence from Mandarin. Chinese Language and Discourse , 1 (2). pp. 220-263. ISSN: 1877-8798 | doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1075/cld.1.2.03law