Formal name: Annabelle Lukin

Position: Macquarie University Research Fellow, Centre for Language and Social Life, and Lecturer in Linguistics.

Personal Title: Dr

Qualifications: BA (History and Sociology), University of Queensland
MA (Spanish and Latin American Studies) University of New South Wales
Dip Ed (History and TESOL) University of Sydney
Grad Cert (TESOL) University of Technology, Sydney
Grad Dip (Education Studies) (With Merit) University of Sydney
PhD (Linguistics) Macquarie University

Telephone: +61 2 9850 8607

Fax: +61 2 9850 9199

Email: annabelle.lukinATling.mq.edu.au

(please substitute @ for AT in the email address above)

Location: C5A 423

Web Pages: Selected Publications

Profile

Annabelle is currently working on a project investigating notions of bias in the reporting of war, using a corpus based, linguistic approach. This project grew out of earlier work in collaboration with Professor Christian Matthiessen and Associate Professor David Butt on the discourses of war. This project has been studying textual practices which contribute to the creation of climates of meaning amenable to the prosecution of war. Text forms under investigation include news reports, political speeches and press briefings. She is also a member of The News Project, based at the University of Wollongong, a project investigating news discourses across languages. She is contributing analysis of news texts in Spanish.

In her PhD research, she investigated the study of literature in high school, and the processes by which theoretical knowledge is recontextualised in syllabus documents and enacted in educational practices. She demonstrated the disjunction between taking a theoretical position on how literary texts ought to be studied, and how such theory can be seen, or not, in actual textual practices: in other words, what does it mean in practice to be, for instance, a structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, or Leavisite critic? She considered this question with respect to the teaching and assessment of the study of poetry in the senior high school in NSW, and in the context of the recent shift to a much more explicitly theoretical English syllabus. She was awarded the Vice-Chancellor’s commendation for a thesis of ‘exceptional merit’. She has recently extended her stylistic interests to Graham Greene, and is working on a collaborative paper on point of view in The Quiet American, and has a co-authored paper in press on stylistics in the systemic functional linguistic tradition.

With colleagues at UTS, she is part of a research team investigating the interaction of intonation with other levels of the language system, grammar and semantics. She has contributed expertise in theories and analysis of semantics, in particular with the analysis of ‘speech function’ and ‘semantic networks’, as developed by Emeritus Professors M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan. The project is the first to investigate a social context with attention to all levels of form and meaning in discourse. This project is part of an umbrella project, called AusTalk, which is developing a corpus of spoken Australian English. She has been part of the AusTalk project team since 2001, and has collected and contributed new data to the corpus. The corpus is approaching 1 million words, and includes registers as varied as dinner party conversation, service encounters, workplace meetings, and university lectures.

She has also been interested in child language development and language evolution, and in 2004 co-edited a volume of papers with Geoff Williams called Language Development: functional perspectives on species and individuals (Continuum: London). She is currently studying the emerging language of her 18 month old son.

Annabelle is actively committed to bringing linguistics to the general public, and has produced pieces for media as diverse as ABC Radio National (Ockham’s Razor and Perspective), D!ssent magazine, Education Links, Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and Macquarie News, and been interviewed on Melbourne’s 3AK, Triple J and Radio National’s Life Matters programme.

Previously, Annabelle has worked in language and literacy education, as a teacher, materials writer and curriculum developer, with ESL and Aboriginal tertiary preparation students.