Cardiff University’s Centre for Language and Communication Research and Swansea University’s Language Research Centre match compatibility with distinctiveness and complementary offerings. Swansea specialises in language testing and media discourse and memory. Cardiff offers sociolinguistics (especially variation), functional grammar, language and law (especially courtroom discourse and police-lay interaction), word association, formulaic language, language and ageing, including dementia interaction, multimodality including graphic novels and comics and corpus linguistics. The pathway is therefore located in a dynamic hub for the development of new theory at the interface of language form, function, use and processing, and corpus-based discourse linguistics.

The Linguistics pathway sits within a rich research environment, recognised in the 2014 Research Excellence Framework for its very high quality and containing several major externally-funded research projects.  It offers all students opportunities such as discourse analytic training, deepening understanding of the richness and potential of theoretically-informed and linguistically-mediated approaches to content analysis. Corpus linguistics training is also on offer, enabling the examination of large bodies of text for patterns.

Students on this pathway are fully engaged in broader research activities, including committed involvement in our research committee, student-staff panel, postgraduate research seminar series and other forums, and in social events, which, like the summer postgraduate research conference, are organised by the students themselves.

Students on the ‘1+3’ route complete the specialist Language and Communication Research Masters programme which has a linguistically-oriented exemplification of core concepts and techniques.  Subject-specific training and student development continues throughout the doctorate including two annual PhD conferences with external expert guests, providing students with feedback on the content and presentation of their research.