Tine Breban

I joined the University of Manchester in 2012 and am the Smith Professor in English Language and Linguistics. I teach units on English grammar, historical Englishes, language change and corpus linguistics on the BA and MA programmes in Linguistics and English Language.

I was Head of the Department of Linguistics and English Language from 2019 to 2022. I also served as Programme Director of the MA Linguistics (2014-2016) and of the BA programmes in Linguistics and English Language (2017-2018, sem 2 2021-2022, sem 1 2025-2026) and was Assistant Director for PGR Training and Development for the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures (2017-2019).

I'm a corpus linguist working on the grammar of English. I'm interested in all different historical stages of the language, from Old English to very recent.  The main descriptive domain I have studied is the noun phrase. One of the main aims of my research is to better understand the changes that link the different stages and that make the grammatical system of English the system it is today. I am both interested in the synchronic description of the grammatical system, as well as in diachronic changes to that system. Some of the questions I seek to answer in my research are:

What are the processes involved in language change?

How can we identify and study these processes in corpus data?

How is the current grammatical system shaped by historical systems and changes affecting them?

What does this mean for theoretical models capturing synchronic stages?

The answers I put forward are grounded in cognitive and functional theories of language. Specific topics I am interested in are modification in the noun phrase, reference and deixis, subjectivity and subjectification, lexical and syntactic persistence, the continuum from lexical to grammatical meaning, the interaction between function and form, the role of the language system in change.