Isaac N. Mwinlaaru
Isaac N. Mwinlaaru is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English of the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. He obtained his PhD in 2017 from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He is a Fellow of the African Humanities Program of the American Council of Learned Societies and Iso Lomso Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. His primary research interest areas include systemic functional linguistics, descriptive linguistics, language typology, historical linguistics, and critical discourse studies, and educational linguistics, with a focus on Africa. His expertise is in West African languages. His publications in these areas appear in a wide range of journals, notably Research in African Literatures, Language Sciences, Corpora, Critical Discourse Studies, Journal of World Languages, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, Functions of Language, Ibérica, Power & Education, Sociolinguistic Studies, and WORD. His co-authored book 'Systemic Functional Insights on Language and Linguistics' (Springer, 2022) was shortlisted for the M.A.K. Halliday Prize 2023. He has also co-edited a collected volume, Approaches to Specialised Genres (Routledge, 2021). He is also a contributor to The Routledge Handbook of African Linguistics (2018). He has presented papers at many conferences around the world, in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. He has been a Keynote speaker at conferences in Brazil, China and Tunisia.
Recent publications:
Mwinlaaru, I. N., & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. (2025). PROJECTION in Dagaare: Dynamics in quoting and reporting locutions and ideas. Language, Context and Text, 7(1), in press.
Asare, E., Mwinlaaru, I. N., & Amo, E. O. (2024). Construing joy as body parts: Synergising conceptual metaphor and transitivity analyses. WORD, 70(2), 75-105. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2024.2344245
Mwinlaaru, I. N. (2024). What is finiteness in Dagaare? Journal of World Languages, 1-44. https://doi.org/10.1515/jwl-2024-0010
Mwinlaaru, I. N., & Nartey, M. (2022). “Free men we stand under the flag of our land”: A transitivity analysis of African anthems as discourses of resistance against colonialism. Critical Discourse Studies, 19(5), 556-572. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2021.1999286
Mwinlaaru, I. N. (2021). DEIXIS in the Dagaare nominal group: Syntagmatic and paradigmatic perspectives. WORD, 67(3), 281-317. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.2021.1957546