Miriam A. Locher

Bio notes

On 1 August 2008, Miriam Locher started her position as Professor for English Linguistics at the University of Basel. Before this, she worked as senior assistant of English linguistics at the University of Berne, where she taught linguistics introductory seminars (morphology, syntax, semantics, discourse analysis, historical linguistics, the history of the English language) and advanced BA and MA seminars. She was also responsible for study counseling of the Lizentiat students, the MA students and the 'transfer' students.

She is the initiator and administrator of BeLing – a mailing list which links all the linguists of the University of Berne. If you are interested in being added to this list, please send an email to Andrea Ender (andrea.ender@isw.unibe.ch). If you would like to join the SWELL (Swiss Work of English Language and Linguistics) mailing list, which is used for the networking of all Swiss doctoral and Habilitation researchers, you can send a request to Miriam. She is a board member of SAUTE, the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English (www.saute.ch), as secretary, webmaster and delegate to the Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences (www.sagw.ch).

Miriam Locher’s work has been in the field of linguistic politeness and the exercise of power in oral communication (‘Power and Politeness in Action: Disagreements in Oral Communication’, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004) and advice-giving in an American Internet advice column ('Advice Online', Benjamins, 2006). She has edited a collection of papers on impoliteness together with Dr. Derek Bousfield from the University of Huddersfield , UK (‘Impoliteness in Language’, Mouton, 2008) and one on ‘Standards and Norms of the English Language’ (Mouton, 2008), together with Jürg Strässler, University of Zurich. Currently, she is preparing the volume ‘Interactional Pragmatics’ to be included in a new series entitled ‘The Handbooks of Pragmatics’ published by Mouton (together with Dr. Sage Lambert Graham, from the University of Memphis) and a special issue on computer-mediated communication (CMC) and politeness for the Journal of Politeness Research.