Yingnian Tao

Dr. Yingnian Tao is a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University's Department of Psychology, affiliated with the Data Science Institute (DSI - Society). Currently funded by the Welcome Trust, their research examines ethics and sustainability policymaking in higher education through corpus linguistics and participatory methods.

• Doctoral thesis: Analysis of interruptions in everyday Chinese conversations (2022)
• Co-supervised master's students from Universiti Malaya on corpus pragmatics
• Collaborates with environmental marketing researcher Mark Ryan

Research strands include:

• Institutional Policy Analysis: AI governance and net-zero strategies using corpus-assisted discourse analysis
• Sustainability Communication: Greenwashing in fashion/media and energy transition studies
• Media Bias: Interruption patterns in political interviews and Western media bias against China

Recent publications focus on sustainability narratives, political discourse framing, and linguistic evolution in digital contexts. They have peer-review experience for journals like Discourse Studies and Global Media and China.

Teaching encompasses linguistics seminars and pragmatics lectures, including topics on imitation, multimodality, and research methods.