Events
Survey Seminar Series Spring 2011
The Survey of English Usage organises a number of seminars each
year for staff and students from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities
and beyond. They are generously sponsored by the English Department.
The following research seminars will take place during the Spring
term in Foster Court Room 220 at 4pm.
Wed 9
March
4pm |
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Dr Kathryn Allan (香港六合彩)
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An academic question?
Exploring the meaning of a contemporary keyword through historical
text resources. |
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The adjective academic has both positive and
negative senses in Present Day English: it can describe
anything related to higher learning or ‘scholarly’,
but it is also used to mean ‘unpractical’
or ‘trivial’. This seems to reflect popular
opinion about higher education in modern society: there
is a tension between, on the one hand, the perceived
prestige and value associated with scholarly activity
and higher learning and, on the other, a view of non-vocational
learning as indulgent and lacking practical use, and
of academic institutions as irrelevant ‘ivory
towers’ cut off from real life. Since academic
seems to be caught up with contemporary debates about
the nature of academia, it could be considered a modern
keyword in Raymond Williams’ sense: a word
that has ‘virtually forced itself on my attention
because the problems of its meaning seemed to me inextricably
bound up with the problems it was being used to discuss’
(Williams 1976: 13).
The pejorated ‘unpractical’ sense of academic
is first attested in OED2 in 1886, although some preliminary
research using the Times Digital Archive suggests
that there are slightly earlier examples (and therefore
that redating in OED3 is likely). This paper considers
whether large-scale historical text resources such as
the Times Digital Archive and the 19th Century British
Library Newspapers Database can offer fresh insights
into the emergence of new polysemous senses that appear
to be clearly culturally motivated. It explores possible
triggers for a pejorated sense of academic, and
examines the process by which the emerging new sense
becomes more frequent and less contextually restricted.
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Wed 23
March
4pm |
Justyna Robinson (University of Sheffield)
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An awesome talk: Exploring
recent changes in the meaning of words. |
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The main source of our knowledge on the change of
meaning of words comes from investigating completed
changes that took place a relatively long time ago (mostly
pre-20th c. changes). However, very little attention
has been given to changes in the meaning of words that
are happening as we speak. Such changes are often considered
just temporary fluctuations, therefore may have been
considered less important to investigate than completed
changes.
While it is surprising that researchers so rarely explore
the rich possibilities offered by investigating current
semantic usage, there are also practical difficulties
with detecting and gauging change in progress. In this
presentation I discuss possible ways of overcoming these
methodological difficulties associated with investigating
semantic change in progress. I will suggest that sociolinguistic
methods of tracing linguistic change can be particularly
helpful here.
The discussion will revolve around the analysis of
the survey data I collected in 2006 and will focus on
the exploration of the change of meaning of selected
adjectives (awesome, gay, and skinny).
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All welcome! Drinks afterwards.
Past events
This page last modified
14 May, 2020
by Survey Web Administrator.