English Historical Semantics, Paperback

This guide gives students a solid grounding in the basic methodology of how to analyse corpus data to study new words entering the language or language change. It uses a number of case studies to provide insights into collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. Students will become proficient in the key concepts in semantic change by applying ideas from theoretical semantics to historical data. They will also cover recent work at the intersections between historical semantics and other disciplines.

About author(s):

Christian Kay is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and A Thesaurus of Old English, and founded the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech. She has written on historical semantics and lexicography and contributed to projects on metaphor and semantic annotation based on the Historical Thesaurus of English dataset.

Kathryn Allan is Senior Lecturer in the History of English at University College London. Her research interests are in historical semantics and lexicology, and she is the co-editor of Historical Cognitive Linguistics and Current Methods in Historical Semantics. Her monograph Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach was published in the Philological Society series, and she is a collaborator on the Keywords Project