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Position(s):  

PhD Student (TAL) 

 

Department:  

Theoretical and Applied Linguistics 

Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages & Linguistics 

 

Name  

Lin Shen 

 

College  

Wolfson College 

 

Email  

ls2098@cam.ac.uk 

 

Supervisor  

Professor Henriette Hendriks 

 

Research Topic  

Constrained communication of motion events 

 

About Me  

Lin is a PhD student in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at University of Cambridge. Before beginning her doctoral studies in October 2024, she earned a master’s degree in Translation Studies from Beijing University of Foreign Studies (2021–2024) and a bachelor’s degree in Translation from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (2017–2021). 

 

She is fascinated by translation and second language acquisition, and she enjoys analysing both translated texts and learner language from sociocultural and cognitive perspectives. More broadly, she is interested in how translation and L2 acquisition shape and reflect society, culture, and cognition. Her research interests include second language acquisition, cognitive linguistics, corpus linguistics, and translation studies. 

 

Lin is also a devoted cat lover. She enjoys encountering cats around Cambridge, and she is happy to offer cat-sitting services in her free time. 

 

Research 

Lin’s PhD project focuses on constrained communication of motion events. She is particularly interested in examining the factors that influence learner language, translated language, and other forms of second language use within a unified framework of constrained communication. With this approach, she explores the role of mediation in bilingual production and how it interacts with typological proximity and language proficiency. 

 

Scholarships/Prizes:  

Travel and Research Grants (£1200), Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. 

National Scholarship (￥20000), Ministry of Education, People's Republic of China. 

Best Student Paper Award ($300), 9th Asian-Pacific Forum on Translation and Intercultural 

Studies. 

 

Publications  

1. Shen, L. (2025a). Constrained communication of motion events: Exploring shared cognitive constraints in Chinese-French translation and description tasks. Review of Cognitive Linguistics. https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00218.she 

2. Shen, L., & Kotze, H. (2025). Linguistic indicators differentiating translated and untranslated diplomatic discourse: A diachronic analysis of the United Nations General Debate (1946–2022). Lingua, 320, 103933. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2025.103933 

3. Shen, L. (2025b). Typological differences and cognitive load in manner processing: A corpus-based study of Chinese–English and English–Chinese consecutive interpreting. Language and Cognition, 17. https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2024.72 

4. Shen, L. (2023a). LIWC Indicators of Cross-Country Income Inequality at the United Nations General Debate (1987-2020): An Elastic Net Analysis. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 43(1), 118–131. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927x231190861 

5. Shen, L. (2023b). Referential explicitation of English translated diplomatic discourse? A 50-year 56-lingual corpus-based study on United Nations general debate speeches (1970–2019). Across Languages and Cultures, 24(1), 25–51. https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2023.00330 

6. Shen, L. (2022). Culture and Explicitness of Persuasion: Linguistic Evidence From a 51-Year Corpus-Based Cross-Cultural Comparison of the United Nations General Debate Speeches Across 55 Countries (1970-2020). Cross-Cultural Research, 57(2–3), 166–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/10693971221139523 

 

Conference Papers 

1. Shen, L. (2025a, July 1). Typological differences and cognitive load in manner processing: A corpus-based study of Chinese–English and English–Chinese consecutive interpreting. Corpus Linguistics 2025, Birmingham, UK.  

2. Shen, L. (2025b, August 27). Bridging constrained communication and cognitive  semantics: Elicitation approaches to constraints in Chinese-French  translation and L2 production. 58th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Bordeaux, France. 

3. Shen, L. (2025c, September 5). Cognitive effects of L1 use via translation tasks in L2 classrooms: A comparison of learners’ L2 target-likeness of motion event expressions between tasks with and without L1. 58th Annual Conference of British Association for Applied Linguistics, Glasgow, UK. 

4. Shen, L., & Kotze, H. (2025, June 19). Differentiating translated and non-translated English diplomatic discourse: A diachronic corpus-based elastic net analysis of the United Nations General Debate (1946–2022). 46th Annual Conference of International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English, Vilnius, Lithuania.  

5. Shen, L. (2023, August 11). Linguistic analysis of the scarcity mindset: A corpus-based LIWC study of the United Nations General Debate (1987-2020). 16th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Germany. 

6. Shen, L. (2023, July 10). Questioning the East/West politeness divide by language-anchored regrouping: A psycholinguistic LIWC clustering of 55-country 51-year of United Nations General Debate (1970-2020). 18th International Pragmatics Conference, Brussels, Belgium. 

7. Shen, L. (2022, November 20). Shifts of emotion in China’s political interpreting: A corpus-based study of their presence, effects, and contexts (2014-2022). 14th All-China National Conference on Interpreting, Wuhan, China. 

8. Shen, L. (2022, June 26). An Integrated Perspective of Reception In and Out of the Red Mansion: A Corpus-Driven Analysis of Correlation Between Multi-Dimensional Register Features and Quantified Reader Reception of Three Translations of Hongloumeng. 10th Asia-Pacific Translation and Interpreting Forum (APTIF 10), Beijing, China. 

9. Shen, L. (2022, March 25). Beyond a Static and Subjective View of How Diplomatic Translators Construct China’s Identity in Intercultural Communication: A Corpus-Driven Study on the Evolving Discursive Markers of “China” Over Its 50 Years at UN (1971-2020). 9th Asian-Pacific Forum on Translation and Intercultural Studies, North Carolina, United States. 

 

Other activities and roles 

Student Member, European Society for Translation Studies 

Student Member, Societas Linguistica Europaea 

Student Member, Learner Corpus Association 

Co-organizer, Cambridge Processing and Acquisition of Language group 

Reviewer, Lingua 

Reviewer, Wolfson Research Event 2025 

Student Ambassador, Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics Faculty Open Day 

Certified Translator (CATTI). Awarded by Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, China