Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, MAE

Member of the Academia Europaea (elected 2020)

Fellow of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (elected 2013)

Professor (University of Manchester): 2007-

• Associate Dean for Research, Faculty of Humanities (2018-21)
• Head of Linguistics and English Language (2014-2017)
• Head of Languages and Intercultural Studies (2015-2016)

Assistant/Associate Professor (University of Copenhagen): 1996-2007

Editor of the Studies in Pragmatics series (Brill)

Member of the Editorial Board for Journal of Pragmatics

Advisory editor for Pragmatics and Society and Revue Romane

Member of the Executive Committee of the International Pragmatics Association

Convenor and lecturer (2024-25):

LELA20291 Pragmatics: Meaning, Context, and Interaction.

Appointments:

Drop-in office hours [S1 teaching weeks only]: Mon 11am-12pm & Thur 12-1pm 

For appointments at other times, please email me.

• Pragmatics and semantics
• Grammaticalization and meaning change
• Verbal interaction and discourse
• Functional and cognitive linguistics, incl., but not limited to, (Diachronic) Construction Grammar

Past and current research projects

• Hearer's vs Speaker's meaning
• Cyclicity in semantic/pragmatic change
• Reanalysis and pragmatics
• The diachrony of negative markers
• The uses and evolution of response words
• Complaints and thanking in customer-service interactions
• Discourse markers: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
• Phasal adverbs: syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and diachronic change
• The syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of interrogatives
• Reported speech
• Schwa-tagging In Parisian French 
• Pragmatics and Peircean semiotics
• The semantics/pragmatics interface
• GCI theory and language change
• The notion of "literal meaning"

Invited talks

• Guest lectures (60) at universities in China, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.
• Invited speaker (incl. 20 plenaries/keynotes) at 40+ conferences and workshops in Belgium, Canada, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.

Current Ph.D.-students:

Ke Xinling: Epistemic and Deontic Rights in Institutional Interaction. (Lead supervisor)

Wen Yunjia: Investigating the Comprehension of Conversational Implicatures and Motivation among English as a Second Language Speakers. (Lead supervisor)

Ruggiero, Federica: Per una definizione di ironia intertestuale. Testi e rapporti intersoggettivi ironici 'in absentia'. (Università di Roma La Sapienza, Visiting PhD-student, Lead supervisor 2024-25, S2)

Ren Zhiyao: The expression of motion events in Tibetan. (Co-supervisor)

Boomars, Marijn: Conventional antonyms and language change. (Independent reviewer)

Van den Heede, Margot: Language productivity at work: The productivity of minimizing constructions reinforcing sentential negation in French and Dutch. (Ghent University, Belgium, External member of doctoral guidance committee)

Past PhD students at the University of Manchester:

Cosnahan, Roisin. PhD. The role of pragmatics in the evolution of negation in Northern Italo-Romance. 2022. (Lead supervisor)

Angot, Juliette. PhD. Epistemic and subjective expressions in French: the case of je pense, je crois, and je trouve. 2021.  (Lead supervisor)

Donlan, Lisa Marie. PhD. Power, innovation, and language diffusion in an online community of practice. 2020. (Lead supervisor)

Jasim, Mohammed. PhD. Refusals of requests by Iraqi EFL learners at the university level. 2017. (Lead supervisor)

Holden, Cheryl. PhD. Persuasion in business networking encounters. 2016. (Lead supervisor)

Murphy, James. PhD. Apologies in political discourse. 2014. (Lead supervisor)

Russo, Antonia. PhD. L'espressione della sostituzione in italiano: tra variazione nel discorso e mutamento diacronico. (Universita degli Studi di Bergamo, Visiting PhD-student, Lead supervisor, 2023-24, S1)

Ferrari, Luisa. PhD. Coordenação oracional contrastiva: processos de constituição e regularidades de mudança. (Sao Paolo Research Foundation (FAPESP), Brazil, Visiting PhD-student, Lead supervisor, 2022-23)

Zakowski, Samuel. PhD. A functional-pragmatic analysis of the discourse markers gar, oun and de in homilies of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus and John Chrysostom.  [Dept. of Linguistics, Ghent University, Belgium] (Visiting PhD-student, Lead supervisor 2014-15, S1)

Kirkwood, Rachel. PhD. Metaphorical conceptualizations of religious experience, with particular reference to 17th-century Quaker writings. 2022.  (Co-supervisor)

Alroqi, Haifa. PhD. The relationship between screen media exposure and early language development. 2019. (Independent Reviewer)

Begley, Mary. PhD. The Middle English lexical field of INSANITY: Semantic change and conceptual metaphor. 2018. (Independent Reviewer)

Chapman, Victoria. PhD. The microvariation exhibited by passives and impersonal constructions in the dialects of Italy. 2017. (Independent reviewer)

Tappenden, Fred. PhD. A Cognitive Linguistics approach to early Christian resurrection discourse. 2012. (Independent reviewer)

Joubert, Aurélie. PhD. A comparative study of the evolution of prestige formation and of speakers' attitudes in Occitan and Catalan. 2010. (Independent reviewer)