Office: NW905, School of Languages and Social Sciences

Email: r.love@aston.ac.uk

Phone: +44 (0) 121 204 4122

Website: robbielove.org

Twitter: @lovermob

I am a Lecturer in English Language in the School of Languages and Social Sciences. Before joining Aston, I held post-doctoral research posts at Cambridge Assessment English and the University of Leeds, and worked as a part-time Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University.

I am an applied linguist with a particular interest in corpus linguistics, both from a methodological and analytical perspective. A lot of my work to date has focussed on the creation and analysis of spoken corpora: my monograph "Overcoming Challenges in Corpus Construction", which describes my work on the creation of the spoken component of the British National Corpus 2014, was published by Routledge in 2020. I am currently conducting research which uses this and other spoken corpora to explore recent change in spoken grammar and discourse.

I am also interested in the role of language in mainstream UK education. I am currently working with the University of Leeds on the ESRC-funded project Linguistic Challenges of the Transition from Primary to Secondary School, which involves the creation and analysis of written and spoken corpora of the academic language that students typically encounter in primary and secondary school.

More broadly, I maintain an interest in language in the news media and other public discourse spaces.

2020-21

Teaching Period 1

• Language in the News Media

Teaching Period 2

• Advanced Topics in Sociolinguistics
• Crime Fiction
• Multimodal Analysis
• Practical Applications of Language Description

I would be very happy to talk to prospective doctoral researchers interested in any of the following areas:
- English corpus linguistics: corpus design, corpus data collection, multimodal corpora, spoken discourse, spoken grammar, language change, news/media discourse analysis
- language in mainstream education: the secondary transition, academic language, teacher talk, relationships and sex education

2018: Updating AntConc for spoken and educational language data

Visiting Research Fellowship, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, £8,363

I am available to take on consulting projects in the areas of linguistics and the English language. Previous clients have included Cambridge University Press, MEND, Mischief PR, the National Trust, Reed Business Information and TENA.

The following is an example of my consultancy work.

Speaking Nature's Language - The National Trust (2019)

I was commissioned by the National Trust to investigate changes in the usage of nature-related vocabulary in British English.

Using the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 and its predecessor from the 1990s, I found that several nature words (e.g. tweet, stream and web) had changed in meaning in favour of new technologies.

The result was the launch of a new campaign on the National Trust's website, encouraging young people to engage with nature. This was accompanied by a promotional video. The launch of the campaign was picked up by several national media outlets.

Broadcast media

My research has gained substantial media attention and I have appeared on various media broadcasts to discuss my work, e.g. Sky News, and my work has been discussed on the Jeremy Vine Show on Channel 5. I have also been interviewed for several international, national and regional radio stations including the following:

• BBC World Service
• Talk Radio Europe
• BBC Radio 4
• Sky Radio
• Classic FM
• Today FM
• Voice of Russia
• Newstalk
• BBC Radio Wales
• 2SER (Australia)
• Radio New Zealand
• BBC Radio Coventry and Warwickshire
• BBC Radio Devon
• BBC Radio Lancashire
• BBC Radio London
• BBC Radio Merseyside
• BBC Radio Suffolk
• BBC Radio Three Counties

Print & digital media

I have also been quoted about my research by the BBC News, The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, iNews, The Daily Mail (twice), SchoolsWeek, Business Ghana, Digit, Walta, the Plymouth Herald and Brinkwire, among other print media.

Blogs and articles

I have also written articles for Cambridge University Press' World of Better Learning website (2018, 2017, 2016), ESRC's blog (2017), ESRC's Britain In... magazine (2016, 2015), English & Media Centre's Emagazine (2018, 2015), The Conversation (2015, 2014), ESRC's Society Now magazine (2014) and Macmillan Dictionary (2014).

I am a member of the British Association for Applied Linguistics.

BA Hons Linguistics | Lancaster University | 2013
MA Language and Linguistics | Lancaster University | 2014
PhD Linguistics | Lancaster University | 2018