Mark de Vos

Senior Lecturer
BJourn (Rhodes), MPhil (Tromsø), PhD (Leiden)
Email address: m.devos@ru.ac.za

Some of my students' thesis topics

I am willing to supervise a wide range of linguistic and applied linguistic topics. Here are some ideas.

Multilingual repertoires and strategic rapport management: A comparative study of South African and Dutch small business discourse (Sanne Lauriks)

A case study of the linguistic face management strategies of dyslexic adults (Layle Henderson)

Investigating the Linguistic features in Ugandan English: A Corpus-based Approach (Connie Tukwasibwe)

Subject-Predicate Agreement and Coordination in Bantu Languages: An Optimality Theoretic Perspective (Hazel Mitchley)

Research interests:

The language of assessment (Applied Linguistics)
The linguistics of literacy in Africa and African languages (Applied Linguisics)
Normalization Grammar, dependencies and linearization
English and Afrikaans grammar and syntax
Dialectology and syntactic microvariation
Pragmatics
Language variation

Topics related to my PhD:
Verbal Pseudo coordination
Complex predicates and verb serialization
Aspect and aktionsarten
Verb movement and its triggers
Subatomic syntax

Courses taught:

Linguistics 1 Introduction to Japanese Linguistics
Linguistics 1 Introduction to Language Variation
Linguistics 2 Semantics: Topics in semantics and pragmatics
Linguistics 3 Semantics: Representing meaning
Postgraduate: Language and Mind and Biolinguistics: Introduction to Minimalist syntax
Postgraduate: language change and historical linguistics
Postgraduate: Language and literacy in South Africa

Research Project: The Postgraduate Strategic Early Literacy Imperative: Linguistic and social partnerships in foundation-phase learning in African languages (2013--2015). Funded by Sandisa Imbewu