Sebastian Hoffmann

Universität Trier

Sebastian Hoffmann (PhD, University of Zurich) is Professor of English Linguistics at Trier University. Before moving to Trier, he spent three years at Lancaster University (UK) as Lecturer in English Linguistics (2006 - 2009). His research has predominantly focused on the application of usage-based approaches to the study of language and includes topics such as syntactic change/grammaticalization, use and pragmatics of tag questions, and the lexico-grammar of New Englishes. He is a co-author of BNCweb, a user-friendly web-interface to the British National Corpus (BNC), which also forms the basis for his textbook publication Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb – a Practical Guide (Peter Lang, 2008; with S. Evert, N. Smith, D. Lee and Y. Berglund-Prytz). In recent years, his interests have expanded to include corpus phonetics, most prominently on the basis of the Audio BNC.