Marianne Connors
College: College of Humanities
Discipline: Modern Languages
Department: French
I caught the bug for research whilst on my year abroad in 2009/10. Having developed my existing knowledge of linguistics as an Erasmus student at Université catholique de Louvain, I spent my second semester in Russia, examining second person pronoun use among female speakers in Yaroslavl'. The data collection process and the conversations stimulated with participants were fascinating, and led me to choose a linguistics-based PhD.
Following my undergraduate degree at Exeter, I continued onto the MA Translation programme, which presented a new set of enjoyable problem-solving challenges. It then made sense to combine these two areas of linguistics and translation, and I was thrilled to receive AHRC funding for doctoral research into facework/politeness in subtitling. After looking at the problem in general for my MA dissertation in the context of the film Entre les murs ('The Class'), I am now pursuing a PhD on the narrower topic of pragmatic particles in subtitling. I am delighted that this project is being supervised by Zoë Boughton and Aidan Coveney, who have been very supportive and influential throughout my time at Exeter.
Outside of academia I enjoy singing, and am a choral scholar at the church of Saint Michael & All Angels, Mount Dinham.
