The 16th NNPCiLL Conference 2026

We are thrilled to invite you to the 16th Newcastle & Northumbria Postgraduate Conference in Language and Linguistics (NNPCiLL), a vibrant and dynamic forum for postgraduate students and researchers in language, linguistics and related fields to share their work.

The conference is scheduled for the 14th April 2026 at the main campus of Newcastle University in Newcastle upon Tyne. We will be offering hybrid participation for both in-person and online attendees.

We invite postgraduate students (including MA, MSc, MLitt, MPhil, and PhD) from all areas of linguistic research—both theoretical and applied—to contribute to the 16th NNPCiLL conference via either oral or poster presentation. The deadline for abstract submission is currently set at 31/01/2026.

Programme

9:00-9:45	Registration and Refreshment Percy Building Entrance
9:45-10:00	Welcome to NNPCiLL 2026 Percy G.05
10:00-11:00	Keynote speaker: Emma Nguyen (Newcastle University) Percy G.05 Chair: Holly Drayton Flipping the Script: Children's Surprising Strengths with Passive Voice
11:00-12:15	Session 1: Percy G.09 Chair: Dan Duncan Hind Alsaleh (Newcastle University) First Language Attrition and Syntactic Subject Rose Greetham (Newcastle University) Integrated gender-fair language: acceptability of epicenes in German Ana Aran Sánchez (Normal Rural Ricardo Flores Magón, Mexico) Multilingual Practices and Social Representations of Indigenous Students in Northern Mexico	Session 2: Percy G.10 Chair: Ben Marshall Ofelia Qiang (Northumbria University) A Multimodal Analysis of British Media Images of Ukranian Refugees (2022 - ) Badryah Almesfer (Independent Researcher) Looking Back to Look Forward: Digital Autoethnographic Reflections from the PhD Journey Joel Everett (Newcastle University) Preliminary Investigations of Political Efficacy in Linguistically Innovative Poetry
12:15-13:45	Lunch and Posters Percy Building Entrance Muhammad Shehadeh (Newcastle University) Mapping Meaning in Talk: An Investigation of One Discourse Particle and its Syntactic Positions in Jordanian Arabic Rawan Almuwayshir (St Andrews University) Saudi Arabian Global Governmental Discourse around Non-oil Dependency and Economic Diversification in the light of Vision 2030 Sarah Templeton (Newcastle University) Annotating non-manual question types in British Sign Languages: Refinements for BSL research
13:45-14:45	Patrick Honeybone (Edinburgh University) Percy G.05 Chair: Niamh Kelly Is anything impossible in English r-sandhi?
14:45-15:30	Session 3: Percy G.09 Chair: Adrian Wang Morad Kasmi (The Multidisciplinary Faculty of Nador) An Autosegmental Phonology Approach to the Verbal Binyanim in tarifit Berber Xinyu Zhu (Newcastle University) Degree Adverb Imcompatibility and Post-dé Positioning of AABB Manner Adverbials in Mandarin: Nuclear Stress Rule and Prosodic Prominence	Session 4: Percy G.10 Chair: Olivia King Ben Marshall (University of Nottingham) Onomastic and linguistic evidence for early-medieval bear baiting Sarah Moller (Albert-Ludwigs University) Insights into Anglo-Saxon Societal Changes through the Lexicon
15:30-16:00	Afternoon Break and Coffee Percy Building Entrance
16:00-17:15	Session 5: Percy G.09 Chair: Xinyu Zhu Liam Garside (Newcastle University) An empirical approach to diatopic variation in Romance causative verbs Anna-Merete Thinggaard (Aarhus University) Fordi alt muligt: The internal structure of X in the Danish because X construction Veronica Girolami (Newcastle University) To alternate or not: Double Auxiliary Constructions in Ascolano	Session 6: Percy G.10 Chair: Katerina Stoumpou Yulin Diao (Northumbria University) Trauma-informed Policy in Public Service Interpreter Training: A Critical Analysis Sophie Frankpitt (UCL, University of Warwick) "I Do Feel Like the Mum and Dad": negotiating Competing Patriarchal ideologies in the Construction of Single Mother Identity Evangelia Mourtzanou (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens) Victim or Survivor? Identity construction in victim narratives
17:15	Closing Remarks Percy G.05
	Conference Dinner Happiness Inn, Percy Street

Getting Here - Guide

Click the link above for a detailed guide on how to reach Newcastle University. This includes a city map, a campus map (look for number 23, the Percy Building) and information on local and national transport links to/within the city.

Travelling by train: Newcastle Central Station is on the east coast main line and directly accessible from London King's Cross, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The University can easily be reached from Newcastle Central Station using the Metro. Haymarket Metro station is opposite the campus and only two stops from Central Station. The campus is approximately 18-minutes' walk from the train station, please see directions below. A Taxi rank is also outside the station.

See the university's travel page at https://www.ncl.ac.uk/study/meet/travel/ for more information.

Plenary Speakers
Patrick Honeybone - Is anything impossible in English r-sandhi?
Emma Nguyen - Flipping the Script: Children’s Surprising Strengths with Passive Voice

Key dates

The abstract submission deadline has passed; the conference programme will be available in due course.

Registration Deadline: 30/03/2026

Conference: 14/04/2026

Proceedings

We plan to publish proceedings featuring high-quality papers presented at the conference and encourage all presenters to submit their work for consideration. Further details regarding submission guidelines and deadlines will be provided in due course.