Research Expertise and Interest

French linguistics, translation studies, language of the media, language contact, syntax, romance linguistics, History of the Romance Languages, Italian language, history of French, History of the Press, Speech Reporting, Metalinguistic texts

Research Description

Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has a particular interest in the language of the media, especially the role that it plays in language variation and change, the use that is made of reported speech, and the linguistic and textual effects of news translation. Mairi's first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation was published by Legenda in 2011 and her second book, La Presse française historique: histoire d'un genre et histoire de la langue, was published by Garnier in 2021. She has just published a digital edition of the first periodical devoted to the French language itself, François-Urbain Domergue's Journal de la langue françoise soit exacte soit ornée (1784-1795) and a critical paper edition of the same periodical is forthcoming with Garnier. Mairi is currently co-editing two volumes which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. With Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, Mairi is editing Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French and with Wendy Ayres-Bennett, she is editing The Oxford Handbook of the French Language.