Person

Apart from my two earlier fields of research, namely modality and the language of advertising, I have latterly taken an interest in the form and function of English interjections. As regards form, it is obvious that interjections are very heterogeneous, ranging from the occasional letter or sound, via words and phrases to entire sentences. When it comes to function or meaning, there are two main groups, emotive interjections, which express feelings of various kinds, and conative interjections, the purpose of which is to make someone do something.
While I'm considering the problems of delimitation and choice of corpus as regards interjections, I have also taken an interest in the textual and linguistic aspects of the writings of James Joyce, in particular his complex use of names, both place names and personal names. What makes these names so intriguing is that a name is often combined with another name or with one or more words, be they common nouns, verbs or adjectives.