Contact

+386 1 2411 360
monika.kavalir@ff.uni-lj.si

Office hours

WED 10-11

Please write me an email and arrange a specific day and time to meet.

Cabinet

303

Language is neither chaos nor perfect order (after Michael Halliday)

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Monika Kavalir
Department of English

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Monika Kavalir

I am passionate about language and its role in society. Starting out with undergraduate studies in English and journalism, I obtained all of my degrees, including my PhD in 2014, at the University of Ljubljana, and I continue to teach and work here while maintaining a lively interest in how linguistics is done and taught elsewhere. My interests span a range of topics, including “hardcore” grammar (primarily syntax), sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics and stylistics. What they all have in common, however, is that I am interested in how language is shaped and used by people in the real world, both historically and in modern times.

Some examples of theses I supervised or co-supervised:

Linguistic development of names for common herbs from Old English to Modern English (Neža Polanc)

A parallel historical corpus analysis of verbal changes in the synoptic gospels in the King James Bible (Jure Kompara)

Socio-cultural motivations for the acquisition of lexical items in Sranan Tongo’s core vocabulary (Ariela Herček)

Sporazumevalne navade študentk in študentov ter njihove jezikovne izbire v sms-ih in sorodnih sporočilih (Ina Poteko)

“The rotten floorboards of his thoughts”: Mind style in the Patrick Melrose novels (Aja Čelhar; Dean's Prize)

Jezikovne kompetence zdravstvenih delavcev Zdravstvenega doma za študente Univerze v Ljubljani (Haris Mustajbašić)

Some ideas for MA topics:

  • Characteristics of Slovene English (using the Slovene subcorpus of the International Corpus of Learner English)
  • Attitudes to various social groups in the Old Bailey Corpus
  • Skinscapes - the use of English and other languages in tattoos historically and today
  • English in the workplace (in Slovenia and other L2 English countries)
  • Attitudes to English among different social and age groups (in Slovenia and other L2 English countries)

Compulsory Courses

Elective Courses

Staff

Events

09. 11. - 11. 11. 2023
Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Arts

26th Neolithic Seminar 'Eurasian Neolithics: How Cultures and Societies Evolve and Why It Matters'

27. 02. 2023
Faculty of Arts

Online presentation of University of Ljubljana for prospective international students

13. 10. 2022
Administrative Office for Doctoral Study, Faculty of Arts

EUTOPIA Citizen Science Clinics

15. 09. 2022
Administrative Office for Undergraduate Study Programme, Faculty of Arts

Reception for International Students at the Faculty of Arts and at the University of Ljubljana (two separate events)

22. 02. 2022
Faculty of Arts

Online sessions for prospective international students, 22 February 2022 at 1.15 pm (CET)