Schwyter Jurg Rainer

Curriculum

Formations

University degrees and post-doctoral experience
Jürg Schwyter holds a BA in English, linguistics, and history from the University of Pennsylvania (1989) and a PhD from the University of Cambridge (1994). After a Junior Research Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford, he was a lecturer in English language and linguistics at various Swiss universities and a post-doctoral assistant (C1) at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He joined the Lausanne faculty as professor in 2001.

Having retired from the post as professor in 2020 after a brain stroke, he is now a research fellow at the English Department.

Expériences professionnelles

Visiting Professor
Visiting professorships in various Swiss universities, including Berne (2003-04), Zürich (2004-05) and Fribourg (2003; 2005-06)

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Presentation

As a linguist and survivor of a brain stroke, my research interests focus, naturally, on all aspects of language and the brain. I particularly undertake research on aphasia, and the interrelationship of multilingualism and a stroke. Also, my fields of specialisation are socio- and historical linguistics, in particular styles and registers (e.g. legal English past and present), language standardization, and broadcast English and the BBC. Besides publishing journal articles, I have written the book, Dictating to the Mob: The History of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English, published by Oxford University Press (2016).

Publications

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2016

Jürg R. Schwyter, Dictating to the Mob, Oxford University Press, 2016.

- The first written history of the BBC's Advisory Committee on Spoken English

- Draws on letters, briefings, and memos from the BBC Written Archives

- Reveals the conflicts and challenges inherent in standardizing a language

ISBN: 9780198736738

Publisher's Website

2008

Schwyter, Jürg, Dider Maillat and Christian Mair, eds. Broadcast English: Past, Present and Future. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 33, Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2008.

2006

Maeder, Beverly, Jürg Schwyter, Ilona Sigrist and Boris Vejdovsky, eds. The Seeming and the Seen: Essays in Modern Visual and Literary Culture. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006.

Taking their cue from the polymorphous relationship between word and image, the essays of this book explore how different media translate the world of phenomena into aesthetic, intellectual or sensual experience. They embrace the media of poetry, fiction, drama, engraving, painting, photography, film and advertising posters ranging from the early modern to the postmodern periods. At the heart of the volume lie essays on works that characteristically perform intriguing interactions between the verbal and visual modes. They discuss the manifold ways in which artists as different as William Blake or Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus or Stanley Kubrick heighten the tension between the linguistic and the seen. Taken both individually and collectively, this volume's contributions illuminate the problematics of how readers and spectators/lookers transform verbal and visual representation into worlds of seeming.

ISBN: 9783039109975

Publisher's Website

2005

Schwyter, Jürg, Erich Poppe and Sandrine Onillon, eds. Le slipping dans les langues médiévales. Cahiers de l'ILSL 18, Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 2005.

Can be read online here.

Publisher's Website

1996

Schwyter, Jurg. Old English Legal Language: The Lexical Field of Theft. Odense: Odense University Press, 1996.

This corpus-based study examines the lexical field of theft in the Anglo-Saxon law-codes and documents containing reports of lawsuits (charters, writs, and some chapters of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). The individual Old English lexemes are analysed not only in terms of their meaning, collocation patterns, and Latin translations, but also, more unusually in a field-approach, with reference to their distribution over the various textual genres and the discourse strategies dominant in these. Although primarily linguistic in focus, a detailed description of the theft-offences and the wider context in which they occur should also be of interest to the historian.

ISBN: 9788778381941

Publisher's Website

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