糖心原创

School of English

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Richard Jason Whitt

Assistant Professor in Linguistics, Faculty of Arts

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Biography

I joined the School of English as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in Autumn 2016, before which I was a Nottingham Research Fellow (2013-2016) in German Studies (CLAS) working on my own project, "Evidentiality and Genre in English and German". Before coming to Nottingham, I worked as a Research Associate at The University of Manchester (2008-2011) and as a Research Assistant at The University of Strathclyde (2011-2012).

I hold a PhD in Germanic Linguistics from The University of California at Berkeley (2008), an MA in the same field from The University of Georgia (2004), and a BA in English from Georgia State University (2001). I also spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at Leibniz Universit盲t Hannover (2006-2007) and a year as a postgraduate exchange student at Friedrich-Alexander Universit盲t Erlangen-N眉rnberg (2002-2003).

Expertise Summary

My broad research interests lie in the areas of historical pragmatics, historical discourse analysis (including critical discourse analysis and critical stylistics), literary stylistics and corpus linguistics. Specifically, I am interested in the history of medical writing -- midwifery and gynaecology, in particular -- from the Early Modern period (ca. 1500) to the present. I am happy to supervise students with an interest in historically-oriented discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, stylistics and/or medical writing.

You can view my GoogleScholar profile at .

Teaching Summary

I have taught on the following modules in the School of English: 糖心原创ing Language (co-convenor), Literary Linguistics, Advanced Stylistics, Language in Society, Language and Feminism, Discourse and… read more

Research Summary

My current focus is on the development of medical writing devoted to midwifery and women's medicine from the Early Modern period to the present. I am looking at how various upheavals and shifts in… read more

Recent Publications

  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2026. . In: NESI, HILARY and MILIN, PETAR, eds., International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Ed. Elsevier.
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2026. Transmedial Narrativization as Critical Dystopian Strategy in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Toni Morrison's Paradise. Utopian Studies. (In Press.)
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2025. Journal of Literary Semantics. 54(1), 21-36
  • RUDNICKA, KAROLINA and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2025. When people overload the/their stomach(s): Non-Verbal Plural Number Agreement and Generic Reference in Early and Late Modern Medical Discourse. In: BROOKES, GAVIN, CURRY, NIALL, MCENERY, TONY and PUTLAND, EMMA, eds., Historical Medical Discourse: Corpus Linguistic Perspectives. Routledge. 137-153

I have taught on the following modules in the School of English: 糖心原创ing Language (co-convenor), Literary Linguistics, Advanced Stylistics, Language in Society, Language and Feminism, Discourse and Power, Texts across Time, and Essentials of English. I have supervised a number of undergraduate and MA dissertations as well. Finally, I have taught on a number of postgraduate distance learning modules: Descriptive Linguistic Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Metaphor, and Historical Pragmatics.

In the spring of 2020, I became a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Previously, I have experience teaching various modules in German linguistics, German as a foreign language, English academic writing, and Tolkien and Germanic mythology.

Current Research

My current focus is on the development of medical writing devoted to midwifery and women's medicine from the Early Modern period to the present. I am looking at how various upheavals and shifts in childbirth/midwifery culture during the Early Modern period (i.e. decline of learned medicine in favour of more empirical models, the emergence of female writers of midwifery texts, and the genesis of the male midwife) are reflected and negotiated within the discourse of medical texts devoted to midwifery and gynaecology. I am particularly interested in how knowledge related to childbirth is appropriated at various levels in these texts, from the metatextual/metadiscourse level through the discourse structure and down to the use of specific linguistic markers relating to knowledge (e.g. markers of evidentiality and epistemic modality).

My most recent project, "Evidentiality and Genre Variation in English and German", was an investigation into the connection between the use of evidential markers and genre variation in the histories of English and German. Evidentiality markers in language -- expressing how we know what we know, or expressing our source of information for what we say -- are of key importance to understanding how language works, for they illuminate how speakers and writers choose to present information to their audiences, and why such choices are made. This project was a comprehensive comparative, corpus-based, synchronic and diachronic study of evidential markers and genre in English and German, of a kind and scale only now possible by recent advances in corpus linguistics and evidentiality studies. Evidentiality has only recently attracted the attention of linguists, and scholarship to date has focused principally on classifying the general grammatical and semantic functions of evidential markers. Very little attention has been paid to the actual social and interpersonal contexts that give rise to and in which these markers are used, and it is this gap which this project aimed to fill.

After a series of initial searches of multi-genre corpora, it was decided that the best direction in which to take this project would be to examine the use of evidential markers in the history of medical writing. Specifically, the early modern period was identified as a period that witnessed the decline of medical scholasticism in favor of more empirically-based models of medical thought and practice. As this concerns a fundamental epistemological shift, it was expected that change in the language (specifically the use of evidential markers) accompanied this broader sociohistorical change. In addition, a desideratum of this research is the creation of a corpus of early modern German-language medical writing to complement extant resources for English, available at the Oxford Text Archive ().

An international conference on Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change was hosted in the spring 2016 to celebrate the (near) completion of this project. Selected peer-reviewed papers appear in a collection published by John Benjamins in their Studies in Corpus Linguistics series ().

Past Research

My doctoral work examined how perception verbs -- verbs of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste -- serve as evidential markers in English and German. Perception is key to our understanding of the world, so it only makes sense that verbs of perception can be used to indicate our sources of knowledge and information. This research resulted in several conference presentations, a monograph and a number of journal articles and book chapters.

I have also worked on two major digital humanities research projects. From 2008 to 2011, I worked as a Research Associate at The University of Manchester on the GerManC Project, which sought to build a representative corpus of Early Modern German from 1650-1800. The completed corpus can be found here: . From 2011-2012, I worked as a Research Assistant at The University of Strathcylde on the "Visualizing English Print, 1470-1800" Project, which sought to test and develop digital methods of text analysis and statistical visualisations using large corpora of Early Modern English texts.

  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2026. . In: NESI, HILARY and MILIN, PETAR, eds., International Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 3rd Ed. Elsevier.
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2026. Transmedial Narrativization as Critical Dystopian Strategy in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills and Toni Morrison's Paradise. Utopian Studies. (In Press.)
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2025. Journal of Literary Semantics. 54(1), 21-36
  • RUDNICKA, KAROLINA and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2025. When people overload the/their stomach(s): Non-Verbal Plural Number Agreement and Generic Reference in Early and Late Modern Medical Discourse. In: BROOKES, GAVIN, CURRY, NIALL, MCENERY, TONY and PUTLAND, EMMA, eds., Historical Medical Discourse: Corpus Linguistic Perspectives. Routledge. 137-153
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2025. Sensory Language as a Gateway to Knowledge and Evidence in Early Modern English Midwifery Writing (1540-1800): On Verbs of Tactile Perception. In: BROOKES, GAVIN, CURRY, NIALL, MCENERY, TONY and PUTLAND, EMMA, eds., Historical Medical Discourse: Corpus Linguistic Perspectives. Routledge. 154-178
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2025. Women's Writing. 32(1), 66-84
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2024. Language and Literature. 33(2), 111-129
  • TAAVITSAINEN, IRMA and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2023. The Medical Press, Case 糖心原创 15 -- Knowing the Parts of Woman: How Knowledge about Reproduction and Childbirth was Communicated in the Earliest Medical Press. In: BROWNLEES, NICHOLAS, ed., The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 1: Beginnings and Consolidation, 1640-1800. Edinburgh University Press. 423-450
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2023. English Language and Linguistics. 27(2), 241-269
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2023. Style. 57(2), 187-204
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2023. English Studies. 104(8), 1363-1380
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2022. . In: HILTUNEN, TURO and TAAVITSAINEN, IRMA, eds., Corpus Pragmatic Studies on the History of Medical Discourse. John Benjamins. 179-202
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2019. Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. 120, 83-111
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2018. Journal of Historical Pragmatics. 19(1), 122-149
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., ed., 2018. John Benjamins.
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2018. Using Diachronic Corpora to Understand the Connection between Genre and Language Change. In: WHITT, RICHARD J., ed., Diachronic Corpora, Genre, and Language Change. John Benjamins. 1-15
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2018. English Text Construction. 11(2), 225-255
  • DURRELL, MARTIN and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2016. Beitr盲ge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur: PBB. 138(3), 325-364
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2016. Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. 2(2), 235-263
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2016. Kalbotyra (Special Issue on Modality and Evidentiality). 69, 265-291
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2016. Evidentialit盲tsmarker in deutschen und englischen wissenschaftlichen Texten der (fr眉hen) Neuzeit. In: ZHU, JIANHUA, ZHAO, JIN and SZURAWITZKI, MICHAEL, eds., Germanistik zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Akten des XIII. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung f眉r Germanistik (IVG), Shanghai, 23.-30.8.2015. 3. Peter Lang. 361-368
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2016. Oxford.
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2015. Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis. 20(2), 233-271
  • KOTIN, MICHAIL L. and WHITT, RICHARD J., eds., 2015. To be or not to be?: The Verbum Substantivum from Synchronic, Diachronic and Typological Perspectives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2014. Singular perception, multiple perspectives through we: Constructing intersubjective meaning in English and German. In: PAVLIDOU, THEODOSSIA-SOULA, ed., Constructing Collectivity: 'We' across Languages and Contexts. John Benjamins. 45-64
  • DURRELL, MARTIN, BENNETT, PAUL, SCHEIBLE, SILKE and WHITT, RICHARD J., eds., 2013. New Methods in Historical Corpora. G眉nter Narr.
  • DURRELL, MARTIN and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2013. Zum Abbau der regionalen Varianten im Standardisierungsprozess 1650-1800. Belege aus dem GerManC-Korpus. In: Akten des XII. internationalen Germanistenkongresses Warschau 2010: Vielheit und Einheit der Germanistik weltweit. 17. 107-111
  • BENNET, PAUL, DURRELL, MARTIN, SCHEIBLE, SILKE and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2013. Preface. In: BENNETT, PAUL, DURRELL, MARTIN, SCHEIBLE, SILKE and WHITT, RICHARD J., eds., New Methods in Historical Corpora G眉nter Narr. 7-13
  • DURRELL, MARTIN, BENNETT, PAUL, SCHEIBLE, SILKE, WHITT, RICHARD J. and ENSSLIN, ASTRID, 2012. Oxford.
  • FROEHLICH, HEATHER, WHITT, RICHARD J. and HOPE, JONATHAN, 2012. In: EEBO-TCP 2012 Conference.
  • SCHEIBLE, SILKE, WHITT, RICHARD J., DURRELL, MARTIN and BENNETT, PAUL, 2012. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). 3611-3617
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2011. Journal of Pragmatics. 43(1), 347-360
  • SCHEIBLE, SILKE, WHITT, RICHARD J., DURRELL, MARTIN and BENNETT, PAUL, 2011. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACL-HLT Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences and Humanities. 19-23
  • SCHEIBLE, SILKE, WHITT, RICHARD J., DURRELL, MARTIN and BENNETT, PAUL, 2011. In: Proceedings of the 5th LAW Workshop. 124-128
  • SCHEIBLE, SILKE, WHITT, RICHARD J., DURRELL, MARTIN and BENNETT, PAUL, 2011. Investigating Diachronic Grammatical Variation in Early Modern German: Evidence from the GerManC Corpus. In: KONOPKA, MAREK, KUBCZAK, JACQUELINE, MAIR, CHRISTIAN, 艩T脥CHA, FRANTI艩EK and WA脽NER, ULRICH H., eds., Grammar & Corpora 2009: Third International Conference. G眉nter Narr. 539-547
  • WHITT, R.J., 2010. Evidentiality and perception verbs in English and German Peter Lang.
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2010. Germanic fate and doom in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion. Mythlore. 29(1/2), 115-129
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2010. Evidentiality, polysemy, and the verbs of perception in English and German. In: DIEWALD, GABRIELE and SMIRNOVA, ELENA, eds., The Linguistic Realization of Evidentiality in European Languages. De Gruyter. 249-278
  • RAUCH, IRMENGARD, WHITT, RICHARD J. and ET AL., 2010. Toward the Architecture of the Lie. Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis. 15(1), 53-89
  • BENNETT, PAUL, DURRELL, MARTIN, SCHEIBLE, SILKE and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2010. In: Proceedings of the LREC 2010 Workshop on Language Resources and Language Technology Standards. 64-68
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2009. Lingua. 119(7), 1083-1095
  • BENNETT, PAUL, DURRELL, MARTIN, SCHEIBLE, SILKE and WHITT, RICHARD J., 2009. In: Proceedings of the Fifth Corpus Linguistics Conference.
  • RAUCH, IRMENGARD, WHITT, RICHARD J. and ET AL., 2007. Toward the Architecture of the Apology. Interdisciplinary Journal for Germanic Linguistics and Semiotic Analysis. 12(1), 135-156
  • WHITT, RICHARD J., 2005. The Semantic Development of sollen and wollen. Focus on German Studies. 12, 59-73

School of English

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telephone: +44 (0) 115 951 5900
email: english-enquiries@nottingham.ac.uk