As we get ready for the new term starting in September, this is the fourth in a series of
research news from your lecturers. If you’ve wondered what we get up to when
we’re not with you, this is it…
2017–18 has been a fantastic year for me as a researcher. The key task for this year was to successfully lead to completion Research Theme 2 of the Linguistic DNA project.
Reporting on the outcomes of this task took place through various research activities of all Linguistic DNA team. My activities included invited talks: at University Saarbrücken Identifying and analysing meanings and discourses in 55,000 early English books and at University of Antwerp How do concepts live?, plus a paper presented at the 5th ISLE Conference entitled Linguistic DNA and new ways of exploring conceptual variation and change (with Seth Mehl).
If you want to find out more about conceptual discoveries innovated by the Linguistic DNA project I invite you to read one of the two paper that we have published in the last year. One paper is Linguistic DNA: Investigating conceptual change in early Modern English discourse (co-authored with Susan Fitzmaurice, Marc Alexander, Iona Hine, Seth Mehl, Fraser Dallachy) in Studia Neophilologica.
Another paper is on Reading into the past: Materials and methods in
historical semantics research (co-authored with Susan Fitzmaurice, Marc Alexander, Iona
Hine, Seth Mehl, Fraser Dallachy) in Tanja Säily,
Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer (eds.), Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics (published by John Benjamins).
If you are as interested in the Linguistic DNA project and its practical applications, take a look at the newly-released Linguistic DNA Early Modern Interface, which is available for beta testing.
Linguistic DNA project is one of few relatively large-scale projects in Historical Semantics to have received substantial grants or other funding in the last decade. This raises the question of how research in semantic change and semantic theory has changed as bigger and better data offers new possibilities. This led me and my colleagues to co-organise a workshop on Historical Semantics in the 21st century at 5th International Society for the Linguistics of English in July. Most of the key historical semanticists teamed up in this enterprise, i.e. Marc Alexander (Glasgow), Kathryn Allan (University College London), Fraser Dallachy (Glasgow), Seth Mehl (Sheffield), and Louise Sylvester (Westminster). The workshop interrogated and evaluated the impact of these projects on the field, and addressed the question of how far they have given rise to new research questions or offered new ways of thinking about unresolved issues in Historical Semantics.
One of the unresolved issues in historical semantics is how semantic change happens on the ground, i.e. how it comes about and how it diffuses across a speech community. In order to shed light on some of aspects of semantic variation and change, I researched the use of concepts across different genders and professions in the Old Bailey Proceedings. In order to solve some methodological questions I teamed up with a computational linguist (Julie Weeds, Sussex), Historical Thesaurus expert (Fraser Dallachy, Glasgow), and a historian (Tim Hitchcock, Sussex). With a financial support of the Research Opportunities Fund (Sussex) we discovered patterns of usage which we presented at both invited academic events (September 2017 at Saarbrucken and April 2018 at Glasgow) and key international conferences, i.e. Examining the Case for Old Bailey Trial Testimony as Linguistic Evidence presented in June at the 4th Corpora and Discourse International Conference (Lancaster University) and Distributions of concepts in the Old Bailey Voices Corpus presented in August at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (University of Edinburgh).
Another unresolved issue in semantic change is how individuals respond to semantic change in the community as those individual age. One of my findings is that older people reject the usage of old words with new senses they are uncomfortable with, slowing down the rate of community-wide change. In July I was invited to present my research on this phenomenon at Peter Petré’s panel on ‘Constructionist approaches to individual grammars’ at the 10th International Conference on Construction Grammar, Sorbonne Paris Cité University. My paper was entitled The test of time for cognitive sociolinguistics: reconciling individual and aggregate models of usage.
Thinking about the connection between semantic usage and age has made me consider this relation from an ageing perspective. More specifically, I have started researching the way people conceptualise aging and aging-related health issues and how those conceptualisations differ from the perspective of the socio-demographic characteristics of a person. Therefore, with the help of HEIF funding I have started a project on Dementia, diaries, and digital technologies, which involves interrogating Mass Observation directives using computational semantic tools and close reading. I will report on my findings in my next blog post.
Developing new ways of modelling semantic usage and conceptual content has always been one of my key academic interests. My Sussex colleagues are well aware of that and they let me share my ideas at various events they organise. In April I was invited to run a methodological workshop on ‘Advanced text analytics’ at the Digital Methods Open Workshop Series, Sussex Humanities Lab. In May I gave a guest talk on ‘Mapping concepts: A linguistic perspective’ at the workshop on ‘Mapping, maps and digital enquiry’ organised by Sussex Humanities Lab.
In March I organised a conference on Conceptual Variation, which was the 16th meeting of Corpus Linguistics in the South.
Justyna Robinson
Reporting on the outcomes of this task took place through various research activities of all Linguistic DNA team. My activities included invited talks: at University Saarbrücken Identifying and analysing meanings and discourses in 55,000 early English books and at University of Antwerp How do concepts live?, plus a paper presented at the 5th ISLE Conference entitled Linguistic DNA and new ways of exploring conceptual variation and change (with Seth Mehl).
Another paper is on Reading into the past: Materials and methods in
historical semantics research (co-authored with Susan Fitzmaurice, Marc Alexander, Iona
Hine, Seth Mehl, Fraser Dallachy) in Tanja Säily,
Arja Nurmi, Minna Palander-Collin and Anita Auer (eds.), Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics (published by John Benjamins). If you are as interested in the Linguistic DNA project and its practical applications, take a look at the newly-released Linguistic DNA Early Modern Interface, which is available for beta testing.
Linguistic DNA project is one of few relatively large-scale projects in Historical Semantics to have received substantial grants or other funding in the last decade. This raises the question of how research in semantic change and semantic theory has changed as bigger and better data offers new possibilities. This led me and my colleagues to co-organise a workshop on Historical Semantics in the 21st century at 5th International Society for the Linguistics of English in July. Most of the key historical semanticists teamed up in this enterprise, i.e. Marc Alexander (Glasgow), Kathryn Allan (University College London), Fraser Dallachy (Glasgow), Seth Mehl (Sheffield), and Louise Sylvester (Westminster). The workshop interrogated and evaluated the impact of these projects on the field, and addressed the question of how far they have given rise to new research questions or offered new ways of thinking about unresolved issues in Historical Semantics.
One of the unresolved issues in historical semantics is how semantic change happens on the ground, i.e. how it comes about and how it diffuses across a speech community. In order to shed light on some of aspects of semantic variation and change, I researched the use of concepts across different genders and professions in the Old Bailey Proceedings. In order to solve some methodological questions I teamed up with a computational linguist (Julie Weeds, Sussex), Historical Thesaurus expert (Fraser Dallachy, Glasgow), and a historian (Tim Hitchcock, Sussex). With a financial support of the Research Opportunities Fund (Sussex) we discovered patterns of usage which we presented at both invited academic events (September 2017 at Saarbrucken and April 2018 at Glasgow) and key international conferences, i.e. Examining the Case for Old Bailey Trial Testimony as Linguistic Evidence presented in June at the 4th Corpora and Discourse International Conference (Lancaster University) and Distributions of concepts in the Old Bailey Voices Corpus presented in August at the 20th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (University of Edinburgh).Another unresolved issue in semantic change is how individuals respond to semantic change in the community as those individual age. One of my findings is that older people reject the usage of old words with new senses they are uncomfortable with, slowing down the rate of community-wide change. In July I was invited to present my research on this phenomenon at Peter Petré’s panel on ‘Constructionist approaches to individual grammars’ at the 10th International Conference on Construction Grammar, Sorbonne Paris Cité University. My paper was entitled The test of time for cognitive sociolinguistics: reconciling individual and aggregate models of usage.
Thinking about the connection between semantic usage and age has made me consider this relation from an ageing perspective. More specifically, I have started researching the way people conceptualise aging and aging-related health issues and how those conceptualisations differ from the perspective of the socio-demographic characteristics of a person. Therefore, with the help of HEIF funding I have started a project on Dementia, diaries, and digital technologies, which involves interrogating Mass Observation directives using computational semantic tools and close reading. I will report on my findings in my next blog post.
Developing new ways of modelling semantic usage and conceptual content has always been one of my key academic interests. My Sussex colleagues are well aware of that and they let me share my ideas at various events they organise. In April I was invited to run a methodological workshop on ‘Advanced text analytics’ at the Digital Methods Open Workshop Series, Sussex Humanities Lab. In May I gave a guest talk on ‘Mapping concepts: A linguistic perspective’ at the workshop on ‘Mapping, maps and digital enquiry’ organised by Sussex Humanities Lab.
In March I organised a conference on Conceptual Variation, which was the 16th meeting of Corpus Linguistics in the South.
My interests in researching identity and indexical meanings of words took shape in form of two research outputs in the past academic year. In early 2018, a paper I co-authored with Rhys Sandow was published: ‘Doing Cornishness’ in the English periphery: Embodying ideology through Anglo-Cornish dialect lexis, in Natalie Braber and Sandra Jensen (eds.) Sociolinguistics in England (Palgrave Macmillan).
Another research in that area took shape by teaming up with Lynne Murphy (and with help from Rhys Sandow). We looked at how British English is packaged for American audiences (and vice versa) by analysing the lists of ‘must-learn’ British words presented in American media as well as stereotyped British English in American fiction. On that project, Lynne and I presented a paper at the International Society for the Linguistics of English conference in July: Collywobbles and poppycock: Indexing Britishness for American audiences.
Another exciting piece of news from the past academic year is that I was invited to serve another term as an Associate Editor of English Today: The International Review of the English Language published by Cambridge University Press. Have a look at our latest issue:
Another exciting piece of news from the past academic year is that I was invited to serve another term as an Associate Editor of English Today: The International Review of the English Language published by Cambridge University Press. Have a look at our latest issue:
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