Dr Patricia Canning

Assistant Professor

Department: Humanities

I am an applied linguist specialising in forensic texts and contexts. My work includes the investigation and analysis of police reporting, particularly the attribution and deflection of blame through individual and institutional language choices.

My research projects include forensic stylistic analyses of witness statements following the Hillsborough Football Stadium Disaster (1989) and police and prosecutors' reports of domestic abuse crimes. I also study the production and reception of literary texts and have established a series of reading and discussion projects in prisons, hospitals, mental health units, schools, and universities.

I am a registered expert with the European Anti-Fraud Commission and offer consultancy to national domestic abuse charities.

Email Patricia

Research Themes and Scholarly Interests

Forensic Linguistics
Stylistics (incl. discourse analysis)
Pragmatics
Reader-response
Social justice

Key Publications

Please visit the Pure Research Information Portal for further information
Forensic Stylistics, Canning, P. 29 May 2023, The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Second Edition, London, Taylor & Francis
Functionalist Stylistics, Canning, P. 27 Mar 2023, The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. , Taylor & Francis
“Treated With Contempt”: An Independent Panel Report into Fans’ Experiences Before, During and After the 2022 Champions League Final in Paris, Canning, P., Scraton, P., Haydon, D., Easthope, L., Marshall, P. Oct 2022
Writing up or writing off crimes of domestic violence? A transitivity analysis of police reports, Canning, P. 3 Jan 2022, In: Language and Law = Linguagem e Direito
Additions, Omissions, and Transformations in Institutional ‘Retellings’ of Domestic Violence, Lynn, N., Canning, P. 4 Nov 2021, In: Language and Law = Linguagem e Direito
Hillsborough disaster: a revealing analysis of the language in witness statements, Canning, P. 2 Jun 2021
Police reporting can undermine domestic violence victims, language analysis shows, Canning, P. 23 Nov 2021
Worlds of evidence: Visualising patterns in witness statements in the aftermath of the Hillsborough football stadium disaster, Canning, P., Ho, Y., Bartl, S. 15 Sep 2021, In: English Text Construction
‘I loved the stories – they weren’t boring’: Narrative Gaps, the ‘Disnarrated’ and the Significance of Style in Prison Reading Groups, Canning, P. 28 Apr 2020, The Edinburgh History of Reading, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press
Retelling Hillsborough: A critical stylistic analysis of witness statements, Canning, P. 25 Oct 2020, Narrative Retellings, London, UK, Bloomsbury