Billy Clark
Senior Lecturer in English Language
Department: Media
Contact
- Telephone: +44 (0) 20 84 11 65 55
- E-mail: b.clark@mdx.ac.uk
Qualifications
PhD in Linguistics, University College LondonDiploma in Linguistics, University College LondonMA English Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen
Research Interests
Linguistic semantics, linguistic pragmatics, stylistics, meaning of prosody, experimental pragmatics
Teaching Interests
Language and linguistics, linguistic meaning, meaning in context, language and psychology, stylistics, writing
Biography
I currently teach a number of BA and MA courses at Middlesex, and supervise BA, MA MPhil and PhD students. I am involved in a number of other academic activities, including BA and MA programme development, chairing and acting as a panel member for validation and review events, appraisal and mentoring. I have been external examiner and assessor for validations and reviews at many institutions and have been a member of several external committees, including work with the Higher Education Academy Subject Centre and the Quality Assurance Agency. I am a member of a Subject Centre Special Interest Group on Language and Linguistics at School, and the UK Linguistics Olympiad committee. With Dr. Graeme Trousdale (University of Edinburgh) I teach a residential course on Linguistics ('How To Be A Language Detective') for Gifted and Talented A Level students once a year. This takes place at Villiers Park, the home of the Villiers Park Educational Trust. I was a Senior Teaching Fellow in Pragmatics at University College London in 2009-2010. My current research work falls into three areas: work on the meanings of prosody; work on pragmatic approaches to stylistics; work on inference and writing. I have listed some recent publications and conference presentations below. You can find more information, including some downloadables, at my personal website:
Selected publications
Clark, B. and N. Owtram. In press. Imagined Inference: Teaching writers to think like readers. To appear in Burke, M., Czabo, S., Week, L. and J. Berkowitz (eds.) Current Trends in Pedagogical Stylistics. Continuum, London.
Clark, B. 2011. Recent developments in relevance theory. In Grundy, P. and D. Archer (eds.) The Pragmatics Reader. Routledge, London: 129-137.
Clark, B. and G. Trousdale. 2011. Looking for clues: How to be a language detective. Emagazine 51: 14-16.2009: ‘Salient Inferences: Pragmatics and The Inheritors’, Language and Literature 18.2: 173-213.
Clark, B. 2009. ”The place near the thing where we went that time”: Pragmatics, Stylistics and Pragmatic Stylistics. Topics in Linguistics 3, Constantine the Philosopher University, Nitra: 4-11.
Clark, B. 2009. Salient Inferences: Pragmatics and The Inheritors’, Language and Literature 18.2: 173-213.
Clark, B. 2009. Linguistics in schools. In Malmkjaer, K. (ed.) The Linguistics Encyclopedia, 3rd edition. Routledge, London: 358-362.2009. ‘Ambiguity and vagueness’. In Chapman, S. and C. Routledge (eds.) Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of language, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Clark, B. 2007. ”Blazing a trail”: moving from natural to linguistic meaning in accounting for the tones of English. In Nilsen, R.A., Appiah Amfo, N.A. and K. Borthen (eds.) Interpreting Utterances; Pragmatics and its Interfaces. Essays in Honour of Thorstein Fretheim. Novus, Oslo: 69-81.
Selected presentations
Forthcoming, September 2011: ‘Relevance and multimodality.’ Analysing Multimodality: Systemic Functional Linguistics meets Pragmatics’. Loughborough University.
July 2011. ‘The semantics and pragmatics of prosody: Intergrating prosodic meanings in utterance interpretation’. Paper presented in panel on ‘Cognitive Pragmatics and its interfaces in linguistics’. International Pragmatics Association (IPrA), 3-8 July 2011. Organised by Stavros Assimakopoulos (University of Edinburgh).
May 2011: ‘Writing, reading and interpretation. Pragmatic inference, stylistics and literary studies.’ ‘Interfaces 3’. Centre for Language and Linguistic Studies, University of Kent at Canterbury.
November 2010: ‘What writers mean. Pragmatic stylistics and Raymond Carver’s Beginners.’Murray Kinloch Lecture. Invited keynote presentation at ‘Vowels Ploughed Into Other’: The Atlantic Provinces Linguistics Association (APLA) conference, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
July 2010: ‘One more One More Thing: A pragmatic stylistic analysis of editorial intervention in the stories of Raymond Carver’. Paper presented in Workshop on ‘Pragmatic Approaches to Stylistics’,Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), Genova.
May 2010: ‘Before and after words: the online interaction of pragmatics and semantics’. Invited keynote presentation at conference ‘Beyond the Words: Contextualism, Minimalism and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction’. University of Leipzig.
October 2009: ‘Prosody: conceptual and procedural meaning, natural and non-natural meaning’. Paper presented at conference on ‘Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives’, Madrid, Spain (with Tim Wharton).
July 2009: ‘Inference and the ‘art’ of writing’. Paper presented at Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) conference, Middelburg, Netherlands (with Nicky Owtram).
July 2009: ‘Understanding English Intonation’. Paper presented at The Third International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), London. With Tim Wharton.
March 2009: ‘Pragmatic Stylistics’. Invited keynote lecture at 3rdNitra Conference on Topics in Linguistics, University of Constantine the Philosopher in Nitra.
Other Websites
Languages spoken
French
