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Main themes

Main Themes

Our research and scholarship focus on the following six major interdisciplinary themes. Click on the links below or on the left to find out more about individual themes. To find experts in each area, please see the "Find an expert" section of the website.

Language and cognition

To understand how language works, we must understand how linguistic knowledge is structured, acquired and processed by language users in real time.

Language and computation

Progress in language technology depends on knowledge of how words are used in text, and how human intentions can be integrated with textual data.

Language and representation

Language is not a neutral medium, but a mode of representation affected by a variety of social, cultural and historical factors, always in need of decoding.

Language and society

The interplay between language and society is rich and complex: the investigation of this relationship demands a range of methodologies and perspectives.

Language learning and teaching

Progress in language education depends on active collaboration between teachers of language and researchers of language learning and development.

Multimodality and multilingualism

Multilingualism poses challenges for integration, and the multimodality of communication challenges how we learn and negotiate language and culture.