The observation of the individual’s heterogeneity is complementarily enriching traditional aggregate studies through intra-speaker designs both theoretically and methodologically. This represents a shift in focus from the collectivity of the community to the singularity of the individual. In addition to tracing sociolinguistic patterns of language development longitudinally, informants are now put under the microscope to atomistically observe their sociolinguistic behaviour on the basis of the social (a)symmetries between addressers and addressees. This paper shows results and conclusions on lifespan changes and style-shifting processes in late medieval England by applying contemporary models of intra-speaker variation to collections of historical private correspondence: the orthographic variable (th) in the Paston Letters (1425-1503). When the sociolinguistic behaviour of informants is observed in communicative interaction to see how they were experiencing a given change, patterns of style-shifting emerge, explaining their lifetime (ir)regularities and raising theoretical and methodological challenges for further inquiry.
Effective crisis communication entails being transparent about current uncertainties, whereas ignoring or hiding uncertainties can decrease public trust in the crisis management practices. Despite the increased interest in public crisis communication due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we still lack linguistic research on how uncertainties have been acknowledged by political leaders in their messages to the public. Therefore, our understanding of what works and what does not is limited. This study analyses how British PM Boris Johnson and US President Donald Trump expressed (un)certainty in their 2020 COVID-19 briefings. The findings show that both leaders expressed certainty more often than uncertainty, in particular at the beginning of the pandemic. I argue that their limited acknowledgement of uncertainty may have reduced public trust and hindered crisis management.
The author defended his doctoral dissertation Investigating the relationship between CLIL and L1 ability in a Finnish education context at the University of Turku, Faculty of Humanities, on 22 November 2025. Professor Tarja Nikula-Jäntti (University of Jyväskylä) acted as the opponent and Professor Minna Maijala (University of Turku) acted as the Custos. The dissertation is available at https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-02-0377-1.
