Rate My Professor Adam Smith

Dr. Adam Smith is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, part of the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences. As a corpus linguist, his primary expertise lies in language variation over time and across different regions, lexicography, and terminography. He has made substantial contributions to the study of English language evolution, particularly Australian varieties, through the development and analysis of diachronic corpora such as the Australian Diachronic Hansard Corpus and AusBrown. Adam's research examines register changes, colloquialization processes, modal verb usage, and non-standard morphosyntactic features in world Englishes. His work on parliamentary Hansards from 1901 to 2015 highlights shifts in obligation expressions and densification trends in Australian English. With over 300 citations documented on Google Scholar, his scholarship influences ongoing debates in corpus linguistics and variational sociolinguistics.

Adam Smith's career at Macquarie University includes progression from PhD researcher in the Department of Linguistics to Senior Lecturer, with his promotion confirmed in the 2023 academic promotions round. He was recognized for long service among staff honored for collective 766 years of dedication in 2023. Adam convenes units such as LING1121 Language Myths and Realities, LING2293 Creating and Editing Professional Genres, and EDIT8082 Content Management for Print and Online Publishing. He co-organizes the department's research seminar series, supervises PhD theses on topics including corpus-assisted news values analysis and courtroom interpreting preparation, and serves as contact for corpus linguistics research. Key publications encompass co-editing Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond (John Benjamins, 2009), chapters like The mandative subjunctive in spoken English (2009), and articles such as Colloquialisation versus densification in Australian English (2018, with Haidee Kruger), Register Change in the British and Australian Hansard, 1901–2015 (2019), Diachronic register change: a corpus-based study of Australian English (2021, with Peter Collins et al.), and Non-standard morphosyntactic variation in L2 English varieties world-wide (2025, with Robert Fuchs et al.). He guest-edits a special issue of Languages on Corpus Linguistic Perspectives on Australian English. Adam contributes public-facing insights via Macquarie's Lighthouse on lexicology, political language, and crisis discourse.