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 at UC Berkeley. 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 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) (McLaughlin 2022) and a critical paper edition of the same periodical is forthcoming with Garnier. Mairi is co-editor (with Wendy Ayres-Bennett) of The Oxford Handbook of the French Language which was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. She is also co-editor (with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh) of the volume Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French which was also published by Oxford University Press in 2024.
Mairi is currently involved in a series of collaborative projects involving a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research. These include studies of contemporary news translation with Léa Huotari and Justin Davidson, a study of seventeenth-century news discourse in English and French with Nicholas Brownlees, and a collaborative creative project with the poet, scholar, and translator Vincent Broqua. Mairi’s next major project will explore language in the news and the language of the news at significant moments of innovation and change in the French press. This includes the explosion of handwritten news to circumvent censorship in eighteenth-century France; the development of the first periodicals devoted to language itself starting with the Journal de la langue françoise in 1784; and the French-language press in America in the long nineteenth century.