Dr Sam Oliver

My expertise is in using corpus linguistics and other methods to analyse language in use, particularly issues of politeness and impoliteness (including speech acts such as insults, threats, and thanking), and how speakers conceptualise notions of politeness, impoliteness, and social behaviour more generally. I'm especially interested in how talk about behaviour can be used to control behaviour, and how talk about language can be used to control language use.

My academic interests have crossed the domains of (im)politeness, (meta)pragmatics, corpus linguistics, discourse studies, metaphor analysis, interjections, historical linguistics, stylistics, and - more recently - second language acquisition, language testing, and pedagogy in the context of TESOL.