Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, MAE

Professor, PhD, Dr.phil.

Accepting PhD Students

PhD projects

I welcome new research students, independently of what object language(s) you're proposing to work on, provided your topic falls within my areas of expertise.
Please note that I do not supervise PhD-dissertations focusing on foreign language teaching. Nor will I supervise pragmatics/intercultural communication dissertations based exclusively on data from Discourse Completion Tests (whether written or oral).
See below for my research interests and information about current and past students.

Personal profile

Overview

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

Teaching

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.

Research interests

  • 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.

Supervision information

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)

Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals

In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):

  • SDG 11 - Sustainable Cities and Communities

Education/Academic qualification

Habilitation, (Dr.phil.) Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface: Synchronic and Diachronic Issues. A Study with Special Reference to the French Phasal Adverbs., University of Copenhagen

Award Date: 1 Apr 2008

Doctor of Philosophy, The Function of Discourse Particles. A Study with Special Reference to Spoken Standard French, University of Copenhagen

Award Date: 1 Sept 1996

Master of Arts, University of Copenhagen

Award Date: 1 Feb 1992

Areas of expertise

  • P Philology. Linguistics
  • Pragmatics
  • Semantics
  • Historical Linguistics
  • Functional-Cognitive Linguistics
  • Interactional Linguistics
  • Pragmatic Markers
  • Negation
  • Aspectual Particles
  • PC Romance languages
  • French

My gallery

Cover of Manual of Discourse Markers in Romance