Dr Sam D'Elia

Dr Sam D'elia teaches on a wide range of subjects within the Department of English Language and Linguistics and his focus is on facilitating and advancing students’ knowledge and access to the diverse field of linguistics. He is passionate about nurturing an appreciation of linguistics and the development of transferable skills learned in the classroom which can be applied in the greater context.

Sam received his PhD from the University of Kent in 2016 and his thesis looked at a subset of English double-complement structures. The aim was to comprehensively account for their syntactic structures and to account for how contextual information can drive the linear order of their arguments.  

Sam's main research interests lie in the syntax of argument structure. He is interested in how we refer to events within the constraints of a grammar, and is particularly interested in how this is related to the way that humans process perceptual information.

Sam is also interested in how Language (yes with a capital ‘L’) can give insight as to how we, as humans, think – the language of thought.

Sam teaches on a wide variety of subject areas including first language acquisition, language processing, syntax, structure and meaning, morphology, research skills, semantics and pragmatics, and the history of British English.