Professor of English Linguistics Director, Historical Thesaurus of English Director, STELLA Digital Humanities Laboratory Phone: 0141 330 6501 Address: 12 University Gardens University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QH
The use of metaphor in popular science is widespread to aid readers? conceptions of the scientifi... more The use of metaphor in popular science is widespread to aid readers? conceptions of the scientific concepts under discussion. Almost all research in this area has been done by careful close reading of the text(s) in question, but this article describes{--}for the first time{--}a digital ?distant reading? analysis of popular science, using a system created by a team from Glasgow and Lancaster. This team, as part of the SAMUELS project, has developed semantic tagging software which is based upon the UCREL Semantic Analysis System developed by Lancaster University?s University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, but using the uniquely comprehensive Historical Thesaurus of English (published in 2009 as The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary) as its knowledge base, in order to provide fine-grained meaning distinctions for use in word-sense disambiguation. In addition to analyzing metaphors in highly abstract book-length popular science texts from physics and mathematics, this article describes the technical underpinning to the system and the methods employed to hone the word-sense disambiguation procedure.
The study of astronomical naming practices sits at the intersection of astronomy and onomastics, ... more The study of astronomical naming practices sits at the intersection of astronomy and onomastics, and reveals much about scientific and general culture in both the historical background of, and the complex modern conventions for, naming of these phenomena. This chapter focuses on constellation names, star names, and planet names, and discusses both historical patterns and ongoing trends.
Bernaerts, L., de Geest, D., Herman, L. and Vervaeck, B. (eds.) Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Series: Frontiers of narrative. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, USA, 2013
Adams, M. and Imartino, G. (eds.) Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors: Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography. Series: Lexicography worldwide (11). Polimetrica Press, Monza, Italy., 2011
The complete Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is an unparalleled com... more The complete Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is an unparalleled companion to the Oxford English Dictionary itself for the study of words. Its database, containing a little under 800,000 sense entries, is a resource which can be used in many different ways beyond the preparation of the printed volumes. This article uses the HTOED database to take some steps towards generating data-rich displays of some of the data stored within the thesaurus itself.
The use of metaphor in popular science is widespread to aid readers? conceptions of the scientifi... more The use of metaphor in popular science is widespread to aid readers? conceptions of the scientific concepts under discussion. Almost all research in this area has been done by careful close reading of the text(s) in question, but this article describes{--}for the first time{--}a digital ?distant reading? analysis of popular science, using a system created by a team from Glasgow and Lancaster. This team, as part of the SAMUELS project, has developed semantic tagging software which is based upon the UCREL Semantic Analysis System developed by Lancaster University?s University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language, but using the uniquely comprehensive Historical Thesaurus of English (published in 2009 as The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary) as its knowledge base, in order to provide fine-grained meaning distinctions for use in word-sense disambiguation. In addition to analyzing metaphors in highly abstract book-length popular science texts from physics and mathematics, this article describes the technical underpinning to the system and the methods employed to hone the word-sense disambiguation procedure.
The study of astronomical naming practices sits at the intersection of astronomy and onomastics, ... more The study of astronomical naming practices sits at the intersection of astronomy and onomastics, and reveals much about scientific and general culture in both the historical background of, and the complex modern conventions for, naming of these phenomena. This chapter focuses on constellation names, star names, and planet names, and discusses both historical patterns and ongoing trends.
Bernaerts, L., de Geest, D., Herman, L. and Vervaeck, B. (eds.) Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Series: Frontiers of narrative. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, USA, 2013
Adams, M. and Imartino, G. (eds.) Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors: Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography. Series: Lexicography worldwide (11). Polimetrica Press, Monza, Italy., 2011
The complete Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is an unparalleled com... more The complete Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) is an unparalleled companion to the Oxford English Dictionary itself for the study of words. Its database, containing a little under 800,000 sense entries, is a resource which can be used in many different ways beyond the preparation of the printed volumes. This article uses the HTOED database to take some steps towards generating data-rich displays of some of the data stored within the thesaurus itself.
Following 44 years of intensive work at the University of Glasgow and elsewhere, the Historical T... more Following 44 years of intensive work at the University of Glasgow and elsewhere, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary was published by OUP in October 2009. Based largely on data from the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, its database contains almost 800,000 word meanings and is unique in both its historical coverage and in the detailed semantic information captured by its scheme of classification. Comprising all the concepts which have been lexicalised by speakers of the language since Anglo-Saxon times, the HTOED forms a history of the English-speaking peoples through their recorded word use.
This paper uses the HTOED to examine the terms recorded as being used by English speakers across time to discuss civilization (and the act of civilizing). For example, there are implications for the study of history in the movement of words into, and out of, the Thesaurus categories which detail all the words used for concepts such as colonization, colonies, the act of civilizing, and travelling throughout the empire.
In this way, the HTOED can provide an oversight of the broad sweep of the shifting and changing culture experienced by English speakers, through tracking the emergence of new terms in the language which reveal contemporary perspectives on the nature of civilization and colonialization. In so doing, it also aims to demonstrate the potential of the Thesaurus as a source of evidence for historical analysis.
Current corpus search tools focus on lexical and grammatical results, with their results concerne... more Current corpus search tools focus on lexical and grammatical results, with their results concerned with the distribution of text around a particular linguistic form. An issue which thus arises for content-driven work, such as that carried out in CDA or Conceptual History, is the lack of a comprehensive conceptual-search facility in the vast majority of corpora. The JISC-funded Enroller project at the University of Glasgow integrates a series of linguistic and literary datasets into a single cross-searchable online portal, providing a unified interface for research into English and Scots. It is this integration which enables the Enroller platform to address the problem of conceptual searches in the humanities.
This paper thus explores the research potential unlocked by such searches in existing corpora using the extensive database of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) to examine collocates of the concept of excellence (HTE category 02.01.15.07.08.06) in the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS). Excellence is the third most lexicalised concept in English, with 224 different terms expressing the concept over the past twelve centuries alone, including slang and dialectal terms (such as Scots braw from c1565, or the US out-of-sight, from 1896). Focusing on that which is being described as excellent is of interest to determine the nature of the discourse of approbation within the domain of the constitutive texts of SCOTS (particularly the large number of Scottish Parliament texts it contains); however, as this concept is so variously lexicalised, repeated manual corpus searches of each term in this area would be a disproportionate use of a researcher’s time, especially over multiple corpora. In this way, the combination of lexical and corpus resources on the eScience platform of Enroller aims to provide the community with significant research dividends.
Detective fiction aims to deceive readers with regards to the information it presents, attempting... more Detective fiction aims to deceive readers with regards to the information it presents, attempting to reserve the mystery’s solution until the story’s conclusion. This paper describes Agatha Christie’s manipulation of reader information-gathering and derived expectations by interspersing the first-person narrative of 1936’s The A.B.C. Murders with third-person episodes focalised through a character with a disturbed mind style. By placing these episodes near the murders of the title and by using the A.B.C. character’s disintegrating mind style to keep his motivations ambiguous, Christie pushes the reader into incorrectly suspecting A.B.C. to be the serial murderer that the rest of the book focuses on finding. In addition to describing the character’s mind style, the paper uses Emmott’s contextual frame theory to describe how Christie’s reader manipulation depends on a reader forcibly seeking links across and between purportedly-relevant episodes in a narrative.
A problem which can arise in stylistic corpus work is the lack of explicit connection between wor... more A problem which can arise in stylistic corpus work is the lack of explicit connection between word form and word meaning, especially for those corpora which do not consist of standard present-day English. While semantic searches have been employed in some existing corpora (eg in COCA), these often use small, synchronic synonym datasets, unsuited for overly literary language, regional varieties of English, or historical forms of the language. By integrating existing lexicological resources with corpora, the Glasgow-based Enroller portal aims to provide a useful cross-resource online means for linguists and stylisticians to undertake a range of research into language in use.
This paper explores the research potential unlocked by Enroller enabling semantically-oriented searches in existing corpora using the just-completed Historical Thesaurus of the OED, the largest thesaurus in the world and the only historical thesaurus for any language. In particular, it will examine body-part-as-actor transitivity patterns, using the full range of items in the Historical Thesaurus’ Parts of the body category.
Readers of detective fiction deliberately seek to be deceived by the stories they read; in this m... more Readers of detective fiction deliberately seek to be deceived by the stories they read; in this manner, mystery fiction forms a series of texts that aim to manipulate and persuade. This paper describes Agatha Christie's manipulation of plot-significant information in her short story The Tuesday Night Club by discussing a reader's psychological depth of processing of significant entities and characters. In particular, I describe this technique within cognitive stylistics using the theory of scenario-dependence (see Sanford and Garrod 1998, Sanford and Sturt 2002, Alexander 2006 and Emmott, Sanford and Alexander forthcoming), in which a reader’s partitions of memory dictate the focus of a scenario and the role-mapping of entities within a narrative. I also discuss a different sort of manipulation, where a lobster acts as a ‘red herring’ clue and is made more psychologically prominent through similar manipulations of memory partitions. In this manner, the paper describes how Christie’s puzzle-like plots invite a reader’s engagement while she simultaneously uses psychological means to divert their scrutiny and persuade them to follow the wrong ‘path’ to the story’s conclusion.
Readers of detective fiction deliberately seek to be deceived by the stories they read; in this m... more Readers of detective fiction deliberately seek to be deceived by the stories they read; in this manner, mystery fiction forms an overt series of texts which aim to manipulate and persuade. This paper presents some of the many methods used by writers of such fiction to distract readers from the eventual resolutions of their plots. In particular, it draws on a variety of linguistic, psychological and narratological models to describe for the first time the cognitive and linguistic techniques employed by Agatha Christie to manipulate and distract her readers – these include studies in the depth of psychological processing of texts, scenario-dependence, classical rhetorical persuasion, unreliable narration, theories of social cognition, and ideas from the study of mind style.
This analysis employs these disparate techniques to examine how authors manipulate their readers using non-literary means. It is in this area that the Arts and Humanities can function as an evolutionary ‘space’, where different disciplines can be blended in the service of a single goal. It is here that a fresh and evolving perspective can be given to these fields; to language psychology by drawing on stylistics, to rhetoric by considering narratology, and to literature by employing cognitive linguistics.
Based at the University of Glasgow and funded by JISC, Enroller brings together a range of lingui... more Based at the University of Glasgow and funded by JISC, Enroller brings together a range of linguistic data (thesauri, dictionaries, corpora) into an integrated online repository to provide an enhanced, interoperable resource for Humanities researchers. The project is a collaboration between the National eScience Centre, the University of Glasgow STELLA project, the Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English, and Scottish Language Dictionaries Limited, with other partners from commerce and higher education.
The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between diffe... more The Metaphor Map of English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. These links can be from the Anglo-Saxon period right up to the present day so the map covers 1300 years of the English language. This allows us the opportunity to track metaphorical ways of thinking and expressing ourselves over more than a millennium.
The Metaphor Map of Old English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between d... more The Metaphor Map of Old English shows the metaphorical links which have been identified between different areas of meaning. The links in this version of the Map are from the Anglo-Saxon period. Alongside the parallel Metaphor Map of English resource, this allows us the opportunity to track metaphorical ways of thinking and expressing ourselves over more than a millennium.
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This paper uses the HTOED to examine the terms recorded as being used by English speakers across time to discuss civilization (and the act of civilizing). For example, there are implications for the study of history in the movement of words into, and out of, the Thesaurus categories which detail all the words used for concepts such as colonization, colonies, the act of civilizing, and travelling throughout the empire.
In this way, the HTOED can provide an oversight of the broad sweep of the shifting and changing culture experienced by English speakers, through tracking the emergence of new terms in the language which reveal contemporary perspectives on the nature of civilization and colonialization. In so doing, it also aims to demonstrate the potential of the Thesaurus as a source of evidence for historical analysis.
This paper thus explores the research potential unlocked by such searches in existing corpora using the extensive database of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HTE) to examine collocates of the concept of excellence (HTE category 02.01.15.07.08.06) in the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS). Excellence is the third most lexicalised concept in English, with 224 different terms expressing the concept over the past twelve centuries alone, including slang and dialectal terms (such as Scots braw from c1565, or the US out-of-sight, from 1896). Focusing on that which is being described as excellent is of interest to determine the nature of the discourse of approbation within the domain of the constitutive texts of SCOTS (particularly the large number of Scottish Parliament texts it contains); however, as this concept is so variously lexicalised, repeated manual corpus searches of each term in this area would be a disproportionate use of a researcher’s time, especially over multiple corpora. In this way, the combination of lexical and corpus resources on the eScience platform of Enroller aims to provide the community with significant research dividends.
The project website is www.glasgow.ac.uk/enroller.
This paper explores the research potential unlocked by Enroller enabling semantically-oriented searches in existing corpora using the just-completed Historical Thesaurus of the OED, the largest thesaurus in the world and the only historical thesaurus for any language. In particular, it will examine body-part-as-actor transitivity patterns, using the full range of items in the Historical Thesaurus’ Parts of the body category.
This analysis employs these disparate techniques to examine how authors manipulate their readers using non-literary means. It is in this area that the Arts and Humanities can function as an evolutionary ‘space’, where different disciplines can be blended in the service of a single goal. It is here that a fresh and evolving perspective can be given to these fields; to language psychology by drawing on stylistics, to rhetoric by considering narratology, and to literature by employing cognitive linguistics.