Dr Florent Perek

• PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Freiburg, Germany and the University of Lille 3, France (co-tutelle)
• MA in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing, University of Lille 3
• Engineer’s degree (software engineering) from the Institut de Génie Informatique et Industriel, Lens, France

Hailing from France, I first graduated in computer science in Lens before studying linguistics in Lille. I completed my PhD in English linguistics in Freiburg, Germany, in 2012. I spent my postdoc years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology in Princeton University, USA, and as a Teaching and Research Fellow at the English department in Basel, Switzerland. I joined the Department of English Language and Linguistics in Birmingham as a Lecturer in April 2016.

I teach on and/or convene the following modules on the BA and campus MA programmes:

• Fundamentals of Language: Grammar and Discourse (1st year BA, with Phil Freestone)
• English Grammar (2nd year BA)
• Describing Language (MA, with Garry Plappert)

Florent Perek would be happy to take on prospective PhD students interested to pursue a project in cognitive linguistics with a particular focus on the syntax, morphology, or semantics of English (and/or other European languages), and preferably using corpus-based and/or experimental methods.

Find out more - our PhD English Language and Applied Linguistics  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My main research interests lie in the study of grammar from a cognitive and corpus linguistic perspective. I focus in particular on how syntactic constructions are mentally represented, how they are learned, and how they change over time.

I am a board member of the French Cognitive Linguistics Association (AFLiCo), and webmaster of their website. I am also an editor for the journal CogniTextes.