The research group Variation in Time and Space (VaTS) has been recently founded in the year 2023 by members of the Department of English at the University of Málaga and other Spanish universities sharing some scholarly interest in the study of linguistic variation, both synchronic and diachronic and from multi-faceted perspectives. The unit is mostly concerned with the analysis of the origin and development of linguistic forms in competition, with special focus on orthographic, morpho-syntactic and lexical features. The aim of the group is then to increase understanding of the standardisation of English in the period 1500-1900 and subsequent configuration of present-day English(es). This covers a wide variety of issues stemming from historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, pragmatics and literary linguistics. The unit is particularly interested in topics such as geolinguistics; identity and prestige patterns; language birth and language death; language contact and multilingualism; language and gender; norms, standardisation, purism and prescriptivism; register, genres and text types.
We warmly welcome PhD students interested in areas such as the history of English, corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics and World Englishes.
