麻豆传媒

Biography

I joined SELLL in September 2019 as a Lecturer in Language and Cognition and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2022. I work on the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of questions in adult and in child language. Though much of my work focuses on Germanic languages (especially English and German), I am interested in multilingual language acquisition of any and all language combinations. I am currently co-Principal Investigator on the AHRC-DFG-funded project QuBiSM (Questions, Bias and Multimodality: Negotiating Meaning in Interaction), with colleagues Dr Johannes Heim (Aberdeen) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Repp (Cologne).

In addition to conducting research and teaching in linguistics, I am ethics convenor for SELLL, advising on ethical protocols for research studies at all levels.

I am also interested in sharing linguistics with wider audiences outside academia. I am one of the 2023 cohort of and I have written for and , as well as speaking on and .

Past academic positions

2023 Visiting Researcher, Leibniz-Zentrum für Sprachwissenschaft

2015-2019 Senior Lecturer in Language Acquisition, University of Huddersfield

Education

2012-2016 PhD Linguistics, University of York

Fall 2014 Visiting student, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

2011-2012 MA Psycholinguistics, University of York

2006-2010 BA French and Linguistics, University of Sheffield

A life before academia...

Prior to becoming an academic I had a range of jobs including assistant librarian, English language assistant in France, lifeguard and leisure attendant, bar staff, retail, waiting staff, and French-English translator and proofreader.

My research interests

I am currently co-Principal Investigator on the AHRC-DFG-funded project , with colleagues Dr Johannes Heim (Aberdeen) and Prof. Dr. Sophie Repp (Cologne). I am principally responsible for work packages on child acquisition of negative biased questions, their morphosyntax, semantics and prosody.

I am primarily interested in questions, both main and embedded. I am trying to understand their syntax, semantics, discourse properties, and how they are acquired by children. This plays into a broader interest in the acquisition of speech acts by children - how do they use their knowledge of syntax, semantics, pragmatics, prosody and gesture to map structures to meanings?

Relatedly, I also work on clausal embedding, particularly embedded Verb Second and discourse particles.

Another strand of interest concerns codeswitching in multilingual communities.

Past projects have included bilingual first language acquisition, dative constructions, clitic doubling, sentential adverbs and possessives.

Current PhD students

Abdulrahman Alawadhi (2023-present): Gapping in Kuwaiti Arabic

Deanna Dawson (2024-present): Language Learning Motivation among Young Adults in the North-East of England: A Mixed-Methods Exploration

Please note that I do not work on language education (e.g. children's literacy etc.) so if you are interested in pursuing further study in an area of language education, please contact other colleagues.

Since 2024:

Semester 1

SEL2235/8696 Current Hypotheses in Language Development (CHiLD)/Topics in Language Development Research (ToDLR)

Semester 2

SEL3438/8695 The Black Box of Child Language Acquisition/Learning and Learnability

Since 2019:

Semester 1

SEL1008 Nature of Language

Semester 2

SEL2230/8683 Multilingualism

Past teaching:

2020-2022 SEL1028 Introduction to the Structure of Language II: Meaning strand

• Articles

  • Cuskley C, Woods R, Flaherty M. . Open Mind 2024, 8, 1058-1083.
  • Woods R. . Journal of Pragmatics 2024, 232, 4-25.
  • Heim J, Cuskley C, Woods R, Barber J, Donnelly H, Hu R, Sharma A, Pichler H. . Open Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 2024, 3(2), 30-55.
  • Woods R, Haegeman L. . Quaderni di lavoro ASIt 2023, (25), 821-860.
  • Woods R, Vicente L. . Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2021, 6(1), 1-32.
  • Woods R. . English Language and Linguistics 2020, n/a, n/a.
  • Tsoulas G, Woods R. . Linguistic Inquiry 2019, 50(4), 825-846.
  • Woods R. . Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 2015, 5(2), 252-284.

• Book Chapters

  • Woods R, Roeper T. . In: Trinh T; Benz A; Goodhue D; Yatsushiro K; Krifka M, ed. Biased questions: Experimental results and theoretical modelling. Berlin: Language Science Press, 2025, pp.331-369.
  • Woods R, Roeper T. . In: Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp.835-861.
  • Wolfe S, Woods R. . In: Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp.1-11.
  • Woods R. . In: Rebecca Woods & Sam Wolfe, ed. Rethinking Verb Second. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp.297-322.
  • Woods R. . In: Bart Hollebrandse, Jaieun Kim, Ana T. Perez-Leroux and Petra Schulz, ed. UMOP 41: T.O.M. and Grammar: Thoughts on Mind and Grammar: A Festschrift in Honor of Tom Roeper. Amherst, MA: GLSA, 2018, pp.179-194.

• Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

  • Woods R, Heim J, Wallenberg J. . In: Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 2024, University of Arizona, Tucson AZ [online]: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA.
  • Woods R, Roeper T. . In: 45th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD 45). 2021, Boston University, Boston MA [Online]: Cascadilla Proceedings Press.
  • Woods R. . In: 23rd Conference of the Student Organization of Linguistics in Europe. 2016, University Paris Diderot, Paris, France: Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
  • Woods R. . In: 33rd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. 2016, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver BC: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA.

• Edited Book

  • Woods R, Wolfe S, ed. . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

• Online Publication

  • Woods R. . The Conversation, 2019. Available at: .