Daniel Bürkle

Daniel’s teaching and research go hand in hand, covering language variation across various aspects as well as the psychological underpinnings of language. He teaches, conducts research, and supervises and advises research students (undergraduate and postgraduate) in these areas.

Daniel mostly contributes to teaching in the various English Language undergraduate courses at the University of Central Lancashire. These contributions are united by his Humboldtian ideals of education and by research-based teaching practice: Creative ideas of doing so can come from well-established researchers just as well as from students, and so Daniel believes it is important to teach recent and empirically-founded results and to involve students in research – from having research projects as part of module assessments to projects in the annual Undergraduate Research Internship scheme.

In his early years in academia, Daniel was intrigued by the possibilities of explanation offered by systematic descriptions of language – for example, syntactic explanations for processes of language acquisition, and patterns of noun gender based on word structure. During his postgraduate years in Germany and New Zealand, Daniel was introduced to the more complex descriptions of language variation as a systematic or statistically describable phenomenon, further revealing the complex knowledge that every competent speaker of a language has. This has led to Daniel’s having research, teaching, and supervision interests in the fields of psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics: How exactly do we understand and use language, and how do expectations and experience affect these processes? In what ways and to what extent does language vary between different users of the same language and between different utterances by the same user? How do language users react to and process this variation? Daniel has also worked on methodological questions in linguistics, such as statistical tests for different types of data, modifying established research methods so they can be used with participant groups like children or people with disabilities, and open-source research technology.