Morana Lukač, PhD
Hi there! My name is [ˈmoranaˈɫukatʃ]. I'm a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow in sociolinguistics at the University of Rostock and a guest researcher at Leiden University. My work focuses on linguistic prescriptivism and discursive practices of online communities.
Feel free to browse through this website or reach out.
Bio
Before joining Rostock, between 2020 and 2022 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Greifswald. From 2012 to 2020, I was a member of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, first as a doctoral researcher and later as a lecturer. I did my PhD at Leiden University as part of the Bridging the Unbridgeable research project on the concept of grassroots prescriptivism (or, broadly speaking, normative linguistic efforts of English speakers). I am currently investigating the discursive practices of people reporting traumatic experiences.
Projects
Grassroots prescriptivism
My doctoral thesis Grassroots prescriptivism was a sociolinguistic study of grassroots prescriptivism, bottom-up efforts of lay people to promote the standard language ideology. I used corpus-based methods as well as attitudinal surveys to investigate metalinguistic commentary expressed on traditional (letters to newspaper editors and radio phone-ins) and new media platforms (forum and blog discussions). My study was part of a larger research endeavour, namely, a sociolinguistic project at Leiden University entitled Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) that sought to close the gap between the three main players in the field of prescriptivism: the linguists themselves, the prescriptivists (as writers of usage guides) and those who depend upon such manuals. The project was led by Professor Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade.
Between 2012-2016 I regularly published posts on the project's blog.
Find out more
Copy editors and proof-readers
Sociolinguistics Series
Between 2016 and 2021, I was involved in the organisation of the Sociolinguistics Talk Series at Leiden University which offers a platform for sociolinguists in the Low Countries and beyond to present their research.
The Routledge Handbook of Prescriptivism
Together with Joan Beal and Robin Straaijer, I am the co-editors of the Routledge Handbook of Prescriptivism (2023), a new volume in the Routledge series of handbooks on linguistic topics. The aim of the project is to provide a map of the current status of the field, adding to it the uncharted territory of prescriptivism and thus mark its two-decade transformation into a serious field of study within linguistics. Both the value and the method of studying prescriptivism have been challenged in the past, and this handbook is the first large-scale attempt to make a robust step towards demonstrating both. We attempt a broad coverage in terms of theoretical and methodological approaches, institutional contexts in which prescriptive efforts can be both observed and studied, as well as geographical and historical breadth.
Since 2020, I have been researching the practices of copy editors and proof-readers through a sociolinguistic study conducted together with Adrian Stenton (Leiden). We are interested in how linguistic norms are understood and implemented among gatekeepers in the complex World Englishes context.