Assoc. Prof. Dr. Monika Kavalir Tomšič

I am passionate about language and its role in society. Starting out with undergraduate studies in English and journalism, I obtained all of my degrees, including my PhD in 2014, at the University of Ljubljana, and I continue to teach and work here while maintaining a lively interest in how linguistics is done and taught elsewhere. My interests span a range of topics, including “hardcore” grammar (primarily syntax), sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics and stylistics. What they all have in common, however, is that I am interested in how language is shaped and used by people in the real world, both historically and in modern times.

Some examples of theses I supervised or co-supervised:

Linguistic development of names for common herbs from Old English to Modern English (Neža Polanc)

A parallel historical corpus analysis of verbal changes in the synoptic gospels in the King James Bible (Jure Kompara)

Socio-cultural motivations for the acquisition of lexical items in Sranan Tongo’s core vocabulary (Ariela Herček)

Sporazumevalne navade študentk in študentov ter njihove jezikovne izbire v sms-ih in sorodnih sporočilih (Ina Poteko)

“The rotten floorboards of his thoughts”: Mind style in the Patrick Melrose novels (Aja Čelhar; Dean's Prize)

Jezikovne kompetence zdravstvenih delavcev Zdravstvenega doma za študente Univerze v Ljubljani (Haris Mustajbašić)

Some ideas for MA topics:

• Characteristics of Slovene English (using the Slovene subcorpus of the International Corpus of Learner English)
• Attitudes to various social groups in the Old Bailey Corpus
• Skinscapes - the use of English and other languages in tattoos historically and today
• English in the workplace (in Slovenia and other L2 English countries)
• Attitudes to English among different social and age groups (in Slovenia and other L2 English countries)

I sometimes also co-author papers with students based on their coursework or research interests:

“Uh, I'm a Pretty Sick Guy”: The dialogue of American Psycho in Fiction and Film (with Aja Čelhar)

How to Speak Like a Brontëan Byronic Hero: A Comparison of Mr Rochester and Heathcliff (with Petra Zajc)

“The First Language in My Head”: Student Attitudes to L2 English and L1 Slovene (with Ina Poteko)

“I Am Not What I Am”: Corpus-based Analysis of Shakespeare’s Character Iago from Othello, the Moor of Venice (with Teja Furlan)