Professor Billy Clark

Professor Billy Clark leads research in linguistics at Northumbria University. His research interests are all concerned with aspects of meaning and communicative interaction, often from the perspective of relevance theory. He has applied ideas from relevance theory in considering the meanings of lexical, syntactic and prosodic forms, phatic communication, multimodal communication, and semantic change. His work on stylistics explores the role of pragmatic inference and other processes in the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary and non-literary texts (as well as on questions about what can count as 'literary'). He is currently working on projects which explore the role of pragmatics in the construction and attribution of identities and the application of ideas from pragmatics in understanding the practice and teaching of writing.

He has been involved in several projects which focus on the relationships between activities at school and at university, including the United Kingdom Linguistics Olympiad and the Integrating English project. With the Integrating English team, he runs the LangLitLab , which offers research digests and other resources for teachers, and Mesh, a journal publishing work by current and recent undergraduate students of English. He has also offered consultancy and CPD sessions for GCSE and A Level awarding bodies.

Before joining Northumbria, Billy worked and taught at Middlesex University, Goldsmiths' College, the University of Oxford, and University College London. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Cambridge, University College London and the University of Lille. He is currently involved in teaching at all levels from Foundation Year to PhD. He has also worked with students in secondary schools, including delivering a residential course on linguistics for AS and A Level Students for the Villiers Park Educational Trust.