All Affiliates
Dr David Edmonds
Adjunct Assistant Professor

Dr David Edmonds

BSc, MSc Victoria University of Wellington; PhD CUHK

Contact Information

Phone

3917-4486

Email

edmonds@hku.hk

Profile

Dr. David Edmonds is a sociolinguist with a background in psychology. Broadly, his research interests lie in the study of social interaction and interpersonal communication. He is primarily interested in the study of healthcare encounters, with a special focus on interactions between doctors, patients, and relatives in end-of-life care settings. In addition, his research also investigates the interactional dimensions of psychology and the construction and negotiation of gender in social interaction. Methodologically, he draws upon sociolinguistic and ethnomethodological traditions and utilizes conversation analysis, video analysis and discourse analysis.

Currently, Dr. Edmonds is a Postdoctoral Fellow and is working on a project examining the challenges that working in end-of-life care settings presents for the mental well-being of healthcare professionals in Hong Kong. The project seeks to disentangle the effects of different socio-cultural and occupational stressors on the well-being of doctors and nurses working in end-of-life care. The ultimate goal of this project is to provide organizations with training and educational resources to help healthcare professionals develop effective skills to cope with the challenges of working in end-of-life care. This project is being undertaken as part of the Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (https://www.hkuriich.org/).

Publications

Journal articles

Edmonds, D.M., Zayts-Spence, O., Fortune, Z., Chan, A., & Chou, J.S.G. (2024). A scoping review to map the research on the mental health of students and graduates during their university-to-work transitions. BMJ Open, 14, e076729. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2023-076729

Edmonds, D.M., Zayts-Spence, O., Fortune, Z., & Fung J.S.Y. (2023). Graduates' perceptions and employers expectations: Essential skills in Hong Kong workplaces during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Industry and Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/09504222231224087

Zayts-Spence, O., Edmonds, D., & Fortune, Z. (2023). Mental health, discourse and stigma. BMC Psychology, 11. doi: 10.1186/s40359-023-01210-6

Zayts, O., Edmonds, DM, Kong, BCK., & Fortune, Z. (2023). Mental health of new and recent graduates during the university-to-work transition: a scoping review protocol. BMJ Open, 13. doi:10.1136/bmjopen-2022-071357

Edmonds, D.M. & Pino, M. (2023). Designedly intentional misgendering in social interaction: A conversation analytic account. Feminism & Psychology. OnlineFirst.

Edmonds, D.M., Zayts-Spence, O., & Alder, K. (2022). Communicating in crisis: Reflections, opportunities, and challenges for healthcare communication in the COVID-19 pandemic Qualitative Health Communication 1(2). 104-117. https://doi.org/10.7146/qhc.v1i2.128540

Edmonds, D.M., & Greiffenhagen, C. (2021). Configuring prospective sensations: Experimenters preparing participants for what they might feel. Symbolic Interaction, 44, 183–210. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.485

Weatherall, A., & Edmonds, D.M. (2018). Speakers formulating their talk as interruptive. Journal of Pragmatics, 123, 11-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2017.11.008

Book chapters

Edmonds, D.M., Zayts-Spence, O., Yuen, J.K.Y. (2023). Exploring end-of-life care in palliative care consultations in Hong Kong. In O. Zayts-Spence & S.M. Bridges (Eds.), Language, Health and Culture. Routledge.

Edmonds, D.M., & Zayts-Spence, O. (2023). Conclusion: Advancing healthare communication research in 'Global Peripheries.'  In O. Zayts-Spence & S.M. Bridges (Eds.), Language, Health and Culture. Routledge.

Edmonds, D., & Weatherall, A. (2019). Managing verbal and embodied conduct in telephone-mediated service encounters. In P. Garces-Conejos Blitvitch, L. Fernandez-Amaya, & M. Hernandez-Lopez (Eds.), Technology Mediated Service Encounters (pp.71-95). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

All Faculty
Professor Adam Jaworski
Emeritus Professor and Honorary Professor

Professor Adam Jaworski

MA, PhD, DPhil Poznań

Contact Information

Email

jaworski@hku.hk

Profile

Adam Jaworski is Emeritus Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Honorary Professor at the School of English, University of Hong Kong. He was formerly at Cardiff University, Birkbeck College University of London, and Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań.

Selected Editorial / Advisory / Honorary Boards of journals include: Discourse, Context & Media, Discourse & Society, Journal of Sociolinguistics, Linguistic Landscape (former), and Discourse & Communication, Journal of Language and Politics, Journal of Silence Studies in Education, Language, Culture and Society, Language and Intercultural Communication, Language in Society, Lingua, Łódź Papers in Pragmatics, Multilingua, Visual Communication (current).

He co-edits the book series Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics (OUP; with David Karlander).

He is the author of The Power of Silence: Social and Pragmatic Perspectives (Sage, 1993), Tourism Discourse: The Language of Global Mobility (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, with Crispin Thurlow), editor of Silence: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Mouton de Gruyter, 1997), Metalanguage: Social and Ideological Perspectives (Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, with Nikolas Coupland and Dariusz Galasiński), Discourse, Communication and Tourism (Channel View, 2005, with Anette Pritchard),  The New Sociolinguistics Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, with Nikolas Coupland), Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space (Continuum, 2010, with Crispin Thurlow), The Discourse Reader (2014, 3rd edition, Routledge, with Nikolas Coupland), The Elite Discourse: The Rhetorics of Status, Privilege and Power (Routledge, 2018, with Crispin Thurlow).

Publications

Recent publications include

Adam Jaworski. 2026. Review of Jacob Stewart-Halevy. 2026. The Casual: Downplaying Art Since California Conceptualism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen. November.   

Adam Jaworski. 2026. Review of Gwynne Mapes. 2025. The Language Work of Speechwriters.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Language in Society. 10.1017/S0047404526102450

Corey Fanglei Huang and Adam Jaworski. 2026. Disrupting and (re)making the city: Public art and mental health activism in Hong Kong. Discourse & Communication 20/1: 3–22.

Crispin Thurlow and Adam Jaworski. 2025. Regrounding work in elite discourse. Pragmatics and Society 16/2. 151–173.

Sean P. Smith, Johan Järlehed, and Adam Jaworski. 2025. HOLLYWOOD: The political economy and global citation of an emblematic language object. Language in Society. 54/1: 57–88 (First published online 20 September 2023).

Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow. 2023. Des relations éphémères. Une sociolinguistique du tourisme. Langage & Société 178/1: 23–49.

Adam Jaworski and Jackie Jia Lou. 2021. #wordswewear: Mobile texts, expressive persons, and conviviality in urban spaces. Social Semiotics 31/1. 108–135.

Adam Jaworski and Kellie Gonçalves. 2021. ‘High culture at street level’: Oslo’s Ibsen Sitat and the ethos of egalitarian nationalism. In Robert Blackwood and Unn Røyneland (eds.) Spaces of Multilingualism. London: Routledge. 135–164. doi.org/10.4324/9781003125839 (open access).

Adam Jaworski. 2020. Multimodal writing: The avant-garde assemblage and other minimal texts. International Journal of Multilingualism 17/3: 336–360.

Adam Jaworski. 2020. EAT, LOVE and other (small) stories: Tellability and multimodality in Robert Indiana’s word art. In Crispin Thurlow (ed.) The Business of Words: Linguists, Wordsmiths, and Other Language Workers. London: Routledge. 86–109.

All Faculty
Professor Christopher Hutton
Professor, Chair of English

Professor Christopher Hutton

MA, DPhil Oxon, MA Columbia

Contact Information

Phone

3917-5142

Email

chutton@hku.hk

Profile

Professor Christopher Hutton is chair professor in the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. He studied modern languages and linguistics at Oxford University (BA 1980; DPhil 1988). He also holds an MA in Linguistics and Yiddish Studies from Columbia University (1985), and an LLB from Manchester Metropolitan University (2008). Professor Hutton held a research position at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies from 1985-1986, and was Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas at Austin from 1987-1989, before moving to Hong Kong. His research is concerned with the politics of language and linguistics, especially in the context of law, and the history of Western linguistics, focusing on its relationship with race theory. In addition, he has a longstanding interest in slang, jargon and underworld language, having for many years taught a course in which students do project work on special ‘sub-languages’, e.g. the special vocabulary used by taxi drivers, criminals, prisoners or restaurant workers.

Research Expertise

Language and the law; history and politics of linguistics; sociolinguistics of slang and jargon

Courses Taught

Language and Jargon (ENGL2048)

Saussure and the Politics of Linguistics (ENGL3041)

Law, Meaning, and Interpretation (ENGL2126, LALS 3002, LLAW 3161)

The Law of Signs: Interpretative Controversies in Legal Semiotics

(ENGL2168, LALS3011, LLAW3264)

Publications

The People that Never Were: Linguistic Scholarship and the Invention of the Aryans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2025.

The Tyranny of Ordinary Meaning: Corbett v Corbett and the Invention of Legal Sex. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019.

The Legal Personhood of Animals: Integrational Perspectives on the Self. London: Routledge, 2019.

Signs, Meaning and Experience: Integrational Approaches to Linguistics and Semiotics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (with Adrian Pablé), 2015.

Word Meaning and Legal Interpretation: An Introductory Guide. London: Palgrave, 2014.

Language, Meaning and the Law. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Definition in Theory and Practice: Language, Lexicography and the Law. London: Continuum. (with R. Harris), 2007.

Race and the Third Reich: Linguistics, Racial Anthropology and Genetics in the Dialectic of Volk. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005.

Linguistics and the Third Reich. Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language. London: Routledge, 1999.

Abstraction and Instance: the Type-token Relation in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Pergamon, 1990.