Gareth Carrol
I am a senior lecturer and researcher in linguistics at the University of Birmingham. My research focuses on how people use and understand figurative language, such as idioms and metaphor, as a part of everyday communication. As part of undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, I cover these topics and consider aspects such as cultural influences, language ability and multiple other factors in how people communicate idiomatically. I have published multiple papers and book chapters on idioms, focusing on how these are processed and understood as a part of real-time communication, and in particular comparing important differences between native speakers and language learners, and looking at idioms from different languages. I have also delivered keynote talks at international conferences on this topic. As well as academic publications, I wrote a featured article on this topic (Modern Idioms) for the language magazine Babel in 2019.