Dr. Tim Nisbet
Lecturer in English and German
School of Humanities
Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Email: aa3958@coventry.ac.uk
Biography
After graduating with a BA degree in French and German, I spent a year in Greece teaching English and then returned to the UK to train as a language teacher. In 1993 I was appointed Lecturer in German at the University of Wolverhampton where I remained for 9 years, teaching German language, German studies, general linguistics and translation studies. I completed a PhD in Germanic linguistics at the University of Reading in 2007 and have since worked at Coventry University mainly teaching academic English with a leaning towards the needs of postgraduates. I have also given language teacher training and presently manage the University’s German language provision.
Qualifications
- PhD, ‘The licensing of benefactives in Germanic’, University of Reading, 2007.
- MA in German, University of London, 1999.
- BA Combined Honours in French and German, University of Birmingham, 1989.
Research interests
My main research interest is in grammatical theory and description, with a growing interest in ‘non-derivational’ or ‘constraint-based’ approaches such as Construction Grammar, though I remain convinced that an adequate theory of grammar is not ‘usage-based’ but one that takes grammar to be a form of acquired mental knowledge which remains throughout life relatively unaffected by the pressures of usage. I am presently working on an article investigating the relationship between ‘idiomatic’ and ‘non-idiomatic’ forms of ditransitive verbs in English.
Recent outputs and publications
- Nisbet, T. (2005) ‘Benefactives in English: evidence against argumenthood’. Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 51–67.
Teaching modules
- Academic English (390/395DEL)
- Approaches to Language and Linguistics (110DEL)
- Academic English Essay Writing (AddVantage)
- German language (AddVantage)
Areas of expertise
- Grammatical description
- Syntactic theory
- German language
- Germanic linguistics
