English Language

Email: [email protected]

Richard J. Watts was Professor of English Linguistics at the Institute for English Languages and Literatures from 1984 until 2008. He is one of the world's leading experts in linguistic politeness research, his other active research interests being in the status of the English language in Switzerland, the socio-historical study of the English language (with particular reference to the development of Standard English) and social practices in various forms of social institution, e.g. the family. He has also published in pragmatics, the language situation in Switzerland and narrative theory, and has recently researched into lexical borrowings from English in the Swiss German dialects, an interest which he has retained from the time of his doctoral thesis at the University of Zürich in German linguistics on locative prepositions in English, Standard German and Zürich German. His personal interests and hobbies are his family, his dog, the cultivation of his garden in Erlach, research into the rich folk song tradition of the British Isles, which now in retirement he has time to convert into a book and a number of CDs featuring the songs in his large active repertoire, and last but not least the occasional glass of good, strong malt whisky.