Dr Laura Paterson

Laura L. Paterson 

Head of School, Languages and Applied Linguistics; Senior Lecturer in English Language and Applied Linguistics

BA (Hons) English and Linguistics, University of Leeds 2007; MA Linguistics, University of Leeds 2008; MSc Forensic Psychological Studies (Open), The Open University 2022; PhD, Loughborough University 2011

I am a corpus-based sociolinguist and critical discourse analyst interested in how language is used to encode and normalise social structures. Although I have worked across a range of areas of inquiry - pronouns, poverty, social class, and marriage equality, to name just a few - all my work is underpinned by a focus on the relationship between language and discrimination. To that end, I was one of the founding editors of the Journal of Language and Discrimination. 

My first book, British Pronoun Use, Prescription and Processing (Palgrave 2014), analysed the use of epicene (gender-neutral) pronouns in written British English and included a new theory which aims to account for why the pronoun they can be processed as a singular form in the brain. My work on pronouns has continued, with an analysis of changing usage patterns of combined pronouns (Paterson 2020) and, most recently, my editorial work on the Routledge Handbook of Pronouns (2023). This 34-chapter handbook surveys contemporary research on pronouns and contains contributions from scholars all over the world, covering topics such as acquisition, power, politeness, gender, language change, and history. 

I am also particularly interested in the discourses surrounding (UK) poverty. I was part of the language and social class research project, which surveyed public response to the Channel 4 programme Benefits Street (Paterson et al. 2016, 2017, van der Bom et al. 2018). I have also written about media representations of the welfare state in the late 20th century (van der Bom & Paterson 2020) and demonstrated how ideas about poverty can move across sites of discourse in my analysis of public comments left on newspaper articles (Paterson 2020). More recently, I have written a chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Language and Prejudice (2025) which sets out the important role that language plays in shaping broader understandings of poverty in contemporary Britain and have considered how different 'categories' of poverty are constructed in a special issue of Discourse & Society (Paterson 2024). In 2019, I published the book Representations of Poverty and Place: Using Geographical Text Analysis to Understand Discourse (co-authored with Gregory, Palgrave 2019), which scaled up a form of Geographical Text Analysis to show how different aspects of poverty (homelessness, unemployment, benefits receipt, etc.) are explicitly associated with geographical place-names. 

As a core member of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group I have also analysed same-sex marriage debates in the UK (van der Bom et al. 2015, Jones et al. 2017, Turner et al. 2018, Paterson & Coffey-Glover 2018, see also Paterson & McGlashan 2024). I co-organised a two-day seminar on marriage in 2017 joint funded by the British Association of Applied Linguists and Cambridge University Press which led to a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies (Paterson & Turner 2020). The issue was reprinted as part of Approaches to Discourses of Marriage (co-edited with Turner, Routledge 2023). 

Research interests

I would be interested in supervising postgraduate students in the following areas:

• Corpus linguistics
• Critical Discourse Analysis
• Representations of marginalised groups
• UK poverty
• Pronouns
• Language, gender, and identity
• Linguistic discrimination

Impact and engagement

Spencer, K & J. Mansaray. 2021. Mila Jam: Trans singer says a 'revolution' is happening in the face of a 'pushback' against pronouns. Sky News 31 October 2021. 

Harmsen, Peter. 2021. Effekten af intetkøn [The effect of no gender] Weekendavidsen 22 October 2021. 

Which Poverty and Place: Why how we label different areas matters. OpenLearn 10 March 2021. Online. Available at: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/languages/linguistics/which-poverty-and-place-why-how-we-label-different-areas-matters.

New Books Podcast (New Books Network), 17 November 2020.

Science, speech, and self-esteem. 2019. Women’s Health Live, London, 4 May 2019

Discourse and the media. 2018. Presented at the public seminar series Critical discourse and resistance: How language promotes inequality, Serenity Café, Edinburgh, 18 May 2018.

Paterson, L.L. & G. Turner. 2018. BAAL/Cambridge University Press Seminar: Discourses of Marriage. BAAL News 112: 18-19.

Jones, L. & L.L. Paterson. 2016. Surname strategies: The results! Discourses of Marriage Blog. Available at: http://discoursesofmarriage.blogspot.com/2016/02/surname-strategies-results.html. 

Paterson, LL. 2015. Implied sexism in UK Deed Pool procedures. Discourses of Marriage Blog. Available at: http://discoursesofmarriage.blogspot.com/2015/04/implied-sexism-in-uk-deed-poll.html.

Newcastle Noir Festival. 2015. Presented workshops on stylistics and crime fiction for budding crime authors alongside C. Gregoriou.

Paterson, L.L. 2015. Does it matter what pronoun you use? ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science (CASS) blog. Available at: http://cass.lancs.ac.uk/does-it-matter-what-pronoun-you-use/.

Harding, E. 2015. To boldly use ‘they’ instead of ‘he’ with a singular antecedent. TCANZ Blog. Online. Available at: http://blog.tcanz.org.nz/to-boldly-use-they-instead-of-he-with-a-singular-antecedent/. 

Saner, E. 2014. RBS: The bank that likes to say Mx. Guardian 17 November 2014. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2014/nov/17/rbs-bank-that-likes-to-say-mx. Quoted as expert on gender-neutral pronouns.