Professor Billy Clark

Professor

School: Humanities and Social Sciences

Professor Billy Clark leads research in linguistics at Northumbria University. His research interests are all concerned with aspects of meaning and communicative interaction, often from the perspective of relevance theory. He has applied ideas from relevance theory in considering the meanings of lexical, syntactic and prosodic forms, phatic communication, multimodal communication, and semantic change. His work on stylistics explores the role of pragmatic inference and other processes in the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary and non-literary texts (as well as on questions about what can count as 'literary'). He is currently working on projects which explore the role of pragmatics in the construction and attribution of identities and the application of ideas from pragmatics in understanding the practice and teaching of writing.

He has been involved in several projects which focus on the relationships between activities at school and at university, including the United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad and the Integrating English project. With the Integrating English team, he runs the LangLitLab , which offers research digests and other resources for teachers, and Mesh, a journal publishing work by current and recent undergraduate students of English. He has also offered consultancy and CPD sessions for GCSE and A Level awarding bodies.

Before joining Northumbria, Billy worked and taught at Middlesex University, Goldsmiths' College, the University of Oxford, and University College London. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Cambridge, University College London and the University of Lille. He is currently involved in teaching at all levels from Foundation Year to PhD. He has also worked with students in secondary schools, including delivering a residential course on linguistics for AS and A Level Students for the Villiers Park Educational Trust.

Campus Address

Office: Lipman 418

Email Billy

@billylinguist

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

My research interests include aspects of:

linguistic semantics
pragmatics
prosodic meaning
stylistics
multimodal meaning
semantic change
linguistics applied in speaking and writing

These interests are connected by a focus on aspects of linguistic and non-linguistic meaning.

Much of my research involves exploring and applying ideas from relevance theory. My textbook Relevance Theory was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and an introduction to pragmatics, Pragmatics: The Basics, by Routledge in 2021. I have co-edited three collections and published a number of chapters and articles on aspects of semantics and pragmatics, and on pragmatic stylistics, a field which has grown considerably in recent years.

I have been a member of the AHRC Peer Review College and several journal editorial boards. I have acted as reviewer for several other research councils and publishers. I am currently a member of editorial boards for the book series Cambridge Elements in Pragmatics and for the Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Literary Semantics, Journal of Pragmatics and Topics in Linguistics.

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Pragmatics: The Basics, Clark, B. 24 Aug 2021
Linguists in Schools, Clark, B. 7 Feb 2023, Communicating Linguistics, London, Taylor & Francis
Pragmatics and Literature, Chapman, S., Clark, B. 15 Dec 2019
A relevance-focused production heuristic, Park, K., Clark, B. 1 Jan 2022, In: Journal of Pragmatics

PGR Supervision

Cris Chatterjee A Theory of Indicative Conditionals Start Date: 01/05/2018 End Date: 17/10/2025
Cris Chatterjee A Theory of Indicative Conditionals Start Date: 01/05/2018
Jasmina Pasic The Pragmatics of Narrative Gaps in Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) Start Date: 01/10/2022
Jasmina Pasic The Pragmatics of Narrative Gaps in Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) Start Date: 01/10/2022 End Date: 17/10/2025