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Sebastian Hoffmann received his doctoral degree from the University of Zurich, where he also worked for several years - first as a research assistant to Prof. Gunnel Tottie and then as a 'Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter'. Before moving to Trier, he spent three years at Lancaster University (UK) as Lecturer in English Linguistics (2006 - 2009).

As a dedicated corpus linguist, his research predominantly focuses on the application of usage-based approaches to the study of language. Recent research topics include:

• syntactic change (e.g. the grammaticalization of complex prepositions)
• the historical development and present-day use of tag questions in British and American English
• verb complementation (in particular ditransitive verbs) in British and Indian English
• corpus linguistic methodology, in particular the methodological and practical issues involved in using Internet-derived data for corpus linguistic analyses 
• aspects of fixedness (e.g. collocations)

Sebastian Hoffmann is a co-author of BNCweb, a user-friendly web-interface to the British National Corpus. BNCweb can be accessed for free via a server at Lancaster University. The URL for sign-up is http://bncweb.lancs.ac.uk/bncwebSignup/.

Office hour WS 2009/10

Wednesday 9-11

A sign-up sheet is posted on the office door. Alternative time-slots can be arranged via email.

Other Interests and Hobbies

One of Sebastian Hoffmann's hobbies is photography and he has documented a number of corpus linguistics conferences.  

Selected Publications

Books:

• Hoffmann, Sebastian, Evert, Stefan, Smith, Nicholas, Lee David YW and Ylva Berglund Prytz. 2008. Corpus Linguistics with BNCweb - a Practical Guide. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. (Sample Chapter 1; see also http://bncweb.info)
• Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2005. Grammaticalization and English Complex Prepositions. A Corpus-Based Study. London: Routledge.

Journal articles:

• Hoffmann, Sebastian. 2007. "Processing Internet-Derived Text - Creating a Corpus of Usenet Messages." Literary and Linguistic Computing 22:2. 151-65.
• Mukherjee, Joybrato & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2006. "Describing Verb-Complementational Profiles of New Englishes: A Pilot Study of Indian English." English World-Wide 27:2, 147-173.
• Tottie, Gunnel & Sebastian Hoffmann. 2006. "Tag Questions in British and American English." Journal of English Linguistics 34:4. 283-311.