Lehnen

Pragmatics, Variational Pragmatics, Intercultural Communication, Corpus Linguistics, Teaching English as a Foreign Language, World Englishes, Sociolinguistics, Geolingual Studies

• Geolingual Studies: language and space/place, urban spaces and urbanity, mobility and migration, megaevents, construction of global and local in private and public discourse, identity constructions, role of English in multilingual settings
• English in Hong Kong: historical development, identity constructions, compilation of diachronic corpus, genre developments: newspapers and business letters, variety-specific formulaic language, conventionalisation, communicative practices

Universität Duisburg-Essen

2013 Bachelor of Arts “Anglophone Studies” and “Spanische Sprache u. Kultur”

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

2016 Master of Arts “Applied Linguistics”

Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg

2025 Doktorin der Philosophie 

Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn

Universität Würzburg

Publications

Lehnen, L. (fc.). Integrating corpus-based and interactional approaches to pragmatic variation in World Englishes – A study of disagreements among speakers of English in Hong Kong. Würzburg University Press.

Schulz, N., Lehnen, L., & Biewer, C. (2025). “I shall be glad if you will note...” – Studying early 20th-century business correspondence from Hong Kong to assess variety-specific genre developments. In S. Rüdiger,  T. Neumeier,  S. Leuckert, & S. Buschfeld (eds.), World Englishes in the 21st Century. New Perspectives and Challenges to the Dynamic Model. Edinburgh University Press.

Lehnen, L. (2025). Theresa Neumaier, Conversation in World Englishes: Turn-taking and cultural variation in Southeast Asian and Caribbean English (Studies in English Language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023, Pp. xvi + 290. ISBN: 9781108838023 (e-book). English Language and Linguistics, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1360674324000236

Lehnen, L. (2023.). Review of Bolton, Botha & Kirkpatrick: The Handbook of Asian Englishes (2020). English World-Wide 44(2), 303-311. https://doi.org/10.1075/eww.22052.leh

Lehnen, L. (2020). An der Schnittstelle von Theorie und Praxis: Das Unterrichten von Pragmatik im Fremdsprachenunterricht Englisch aus Sicht von (angehenden) Lehrkräften. In H. Limberg & K. Glaser (Eds.), Pragmatische Kompetenzen im schulischen Fremdsprachenunterricht (pp. 317–350). Peter Lang.

Biewer, C., Lehnen, L., & Schulz, N. (2020). “The future elected government should fully represent the interests of Hongkong people” – Diachronic change in the use of modalising expressions in Hong Kong English between 1928 and 2018. In P. Hohaus & R. Schulze (Eds.), Re-assessing modal expressions: Categories, co-text, and context (pp. 311–341). John Benjamins.

Schulz, N., Biewer, C., & Lehnen, L. (2020). Hongkongites, Hong Kongers, Hong Kong Belongers? Tracing identity (re)constructions in news discourse in Hong Kong from 1903 to 1999. English World-Wide, 41(3), 295–324.

Lehnen, L. (2016). Learning to Do Small Talk – Ideal or Reality? Teachers' Beliefs about the Development of Pragmatic Competence in EFL Classrooms [M.A. thesis]. Rheinische Friederich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn.

Conference papers and invited talks (selection)

• Expanding beyond variety? Challenges of categorising and structurally describing English(es) in geolocated social media data. [with Ninja Schulz] (Talk). 8^th Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (isLE8), Santiago de Compostela, 1-4 September 2025.
• Genre development, comparability and representativeness: Rethinking the structure of diachronic corpora using insights from the compilation of the Diachronic Corpus of Hong Kong English (DC-HKE). [with Ninja Schulz, Carina Stick, Aditiya Upadhyaya & Carolin Biewer] (Talk). 8^th Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (isLE8), Santiago de Compostela, 1-4 September 2025.
• Exploring Local Themes and Global Connectedness in Social Media Discourse from London and Edinburgh [with Ninja Schulz] (Talk). 26^th Conference International Association for World Englishes (IAWE26), Gießen, 25-27 July 2025.
• Integrating corpus linguistics and NLP methods to explore social media discourse from Edinburgh and London [with Ninja Schulz] (Talk).46^th Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME46), Vilnius, 17-21 June 2025.
• Understanding pragmalinguistic choices in appellative letters – focus on early 20th-century business and extortion letters [with Ninja Schulz & Theresa Neumaier].46^th Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME46), Vilnius, 17-21 June 2025.
• yeah. (1.0) but i i always think that the hong kong people prioritise the the international movies sometimes – Discourse-pragmatic variation in disagreements from Hong Kong (Talk). Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Postcolonial English Contexts (DVPEC), Essen. 6-7 February 2025.
• Setting the Scene: Language and Urban Space from the Perspective of Geolingual Studies [with Ninja Schulz] (Talk). 10^th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE 10), Alicante. 26-28 September 2024.
• Geolingual Studies: A New Research Direction. [with Richard Lemoine-Rodríguez]. Guest lecture at Department of Digital Humanities and Social Studies at FAU, Erlangen. 7 May 2024.
• (Interpersonal) pragmatics and world Englishes – Studying disagreements in Hong Kong English (Talk). 25th Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE 25), Stony Brook, NY. 15-17 June 2023.
• Cultural taboos in a global world - a sociopragmatic perspective (Talk). BaTEG Summer School 2022, Bamberg, 28 September 2022.
• Pragmatics and World Englishes – Assessing theoretical and methodological challenges in the study of disagreements in Hong Kong English (Talk). 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE 9), Ljubljana. 15-17 September 2022.
• Compiling a diachronic corpus to trace variety-specific genre conventions across time: challenges and solutions for automatising text recognition of business correspondence from Hong Kong [with Ninja Schulz, Carolin Biewer, Christian Reul] (Talk). 43rd Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME40), Cambridge. 27-30 July 2022.
• The pragmatics of DISAGREEING in Hong Kong – Combining corpus linguistic and interactional approaches (Online talk). New Methods for the Pragmatics of New Englishes Workshop, 30 April 2021.
• A multimodal analysis of DISAGREEMENT in an intercultural context (Online guest lecture). bonn applied English linguistics (bael), 18 January 2021.
• Language use in the peripheries and centres of megacities: Comparing Hong Kong and Moscow [with Carolin Biewer, Elena Dieser & Ninja Schulz] (Talk). 8th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE 8), Bamberg. 26-28 September 2019.
• English in the peripheries and centres of megacities: Exploring the case of Hong Kong [with Carolin Biewer & Ninja Schulz] (Talk). 24th Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE24), Limerick. 20-22 June 2019.
• "But I think uh the situation in Hong Kong is different" – DISAGREEMENT in Hong Kong English (Talk). 5^th Conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (isLE5), London. 17-20 July 2018.
• Does the successful integration of pragmatics into the foreign language classroom start at university? Asking prospective teachers of English (Poster). ALP Jahrestagung (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Linguistische Pragmatik e.V.), Stuttgart. 6 March 2018.
• Studying pragmatic variation in second-language varieties of English with ICE – challenges and opportunities (Talk). 38^th Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME38), Prague. 24-28 May 2017.
• "Small Talk wär mal ganz gut, glaub ich." Pragmatic competence from the perspective of EFL teachers (Talk). BAELc5 (Fifth Bonn Applied English Linguistics Conference), Bonn. 3-4 June 2016.