Who am I?

Hi there!

Welcome to the official website for Matthew Hunt. I am currently a lecturer in sociolinguistics at University of Southampton. I previously completed my PhD in the Department of Linguistics at Queen Mary, University of London.

On this website you will find details of my academic interests and links to papers and presentations I have done. You can download a copy of my CV here.

My work

My main interests are the following:

• Variationist sociolinguistics, with particular focus on language perception
• Socio-semantics
• Multidimensional semantics, expressives etc
• Experimental approaches to semantics, pragmatics and sociolinguistics
• Swearing and taboo language more generally

I’d be interested on collaborating with other researchers on any of the above topics. In particular, if you have a topic you’d like to run an experiment on and are looking for a collaborator with experience designing and running online experiments, then do get in contact!

My PhD

I completed my PhD at Queen Mary University of London, supervised by Professor Colleen Cotter, Dr Hazel Pearson and Dr Linnaea Stockall. The title of my thesis was ‘the social meaning of swearing variation‘. A full copy of the final thesis is available here. It covers a series of experiments looking linguistic variation in swearing – phonetic, morphophonological and semantic/pragmatic – and its consequences for how swearing is socially evaluated.