Dr. Laurel Brinton

Professor

English Language & Literatures

Faculty of Arts

Research Themes: 

Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism

Laurel Brinton is a specialist in the English Language, with a focus on the history of English. Her particular areas of interest include English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies. Laurel completed her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in English with a Linguistics Emphasis in 1981, and has been working at UBC ever since. Her current projects include an edited textbook on English Historical Linguistics: Perspectives and Approaches as well as a monograph on The Evolution of Pragmatic Markers in English: Pathways to Change, both to be published by Cambridge University Press. Laurel is also one of the developers and instructors of the new UBC course ‘Challenging Language Myths’ (English/Linguistics 140).

Research Interests

English historical linguistics, historical pragmatics (discourse markers), grammaticalization and lexicalization, phrasal verbs and composite predicates, corpus linguistics, and aspectual studies.