Peter Andersson Lilja
Associate Professor Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Librarianship, Information, Education and IT (including The Swedish School of Library and Information Science)
— Department of Educational Work
I am Associate Professor of Nordic Languages and Senior Lecturer in Swedish with a specialisation in linguistics. I research and teach in the fields of Swedish Language and Educational Work with a focus on language change and language development. My research is based on cognitive linguistics and usage-based linguistics and is mainly concerned with how language is learned and developed. A majority of my research has included corpus studies and examined the development of verb constructions, including so-called pseudo-coordinations such as "gå och gifta sig" ("go and marry"), "sitta och läsa" ("sit and read"), etc. Of particular interest is how these seemingly "false" coordinations have developed over time and what function they have in language.
In recent years, my research has also become more applied and focuses, among other things, on children's language development in a preschool context. In a current project from the Swedish Research Council, I, together with colleagues, investigate the development of children's narrative abilities with a focus on story grammar and linguistic features in narratives. The project is framed in a usage-based and socio-cognitive view of language learning and maps children's narratives both before and after interventions based on different instructional ideals (explicit-implicit). The project includes over 240 children of which about 100 are multilingual. The project team is interdisciplinary and focuses on both the children's narrative abilities and the interaction between educators and children during the interventions. Qualitative and quantitative methods are applied. Read more under ongoing research projects.
