Dr Paul Flanagan

Research Interests

As a linguist I am constantly fascinated by the language used around me, in conversations, films, pop music, TV shows, in leaflets, articles, books and basically any mode of human existence in which communication is present. For my PhD I investigated the way languages organise multiple adjectives modifying a noun.

In English, we usually say big black dog, rather than black big dog, and in Welsh, we say ci mawr du (lit. dog big black), with the adjectives in the same order, but coming after the noun.

I studied this phenomenon in six different languages, looking at the patterns and tendencies from a linguistic typological perspective, to see if different kinds of languages have distinctive types of structures. As part of my studies, I conducted fieldwork with Bantu speakers in South Africa. I’m always interested in new projects and open to collaborations with colleagues within and outside of my department, discipline and institution.

Latest Achievement

My recent research interests centre on the use of language in popular culture settings: in film, television and in popular music. I published an article in 2019 in the Language and Literature journal on the changing vocal style of Alex Turner, the frontman of Sheffield indie band the Arctic Monkeys. I adapted an existing framework for studying the Americanisation of British singers’ performance to evaluate the extent to which Turner has shifted from his local Yorkshire accent towards an American stylised form over the course of the band’s six albums.

Results indicated that in the band’s formative years, Turner employed a noticeably vernacular style in order to engage with a local audience composed primarily of his peers, while projecting an authentic persona independent of the corporate machine of popular music. Over time though, Turner’s vocals were shown to have become much more heavily influenced by American English, both in terms of his accent features and his lexical and grammatical choices. The findings suggest that British singers have access to a range of stylistic features to index different identities, encoding such elements as geographical and social class heritage, genre styles, audience design, and engagement with popular culture.

Further information

I am now working mostly on language and popular culture, and am currently writing a book on the language of the HBO series Game of Thrones, in which I (collaboratively with my colleague Dr Harry Parkin) am developing a model for studying the language of film and television.

I am also in the process of co-authoring a textbook on applied linguistic typology with my former doctoral supervisor and academic colleague Prof Anthony Grant of Edge Hill University. This volume provides a student-friendly introduction to the area of linguistic typology and explores its logical applications in areas such as sign linguistics (the study of sign languages), conlanging (the practice of constructing languages), language documentation and revitalisation, and the teaching of English as an additional language.