Christian J. Kay, MA, AM, DipGenLing
Honorary Research Fellow (Professorial)
- Contemporary and historical Semantics and Syntax
- History of the English Language
- Lexicology and Lexicography, especially thesauri
- the use of computers in teaching and research
Room 7, 12 University Gardens
telephone: 0141 330 4150
e-mail: c.kay@englang.arts.gla.ac.uk
Biography
Professor Christian Kay is an Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of English Language. Her interests include contemporary and historical semantics and syntax; the history of the English language; lexicology and lexicography, especially conceptual thesauri; and the use of databases and corpora in linguistic research.
Professor Kay is best-known for her work on the historical classification of the English lexicon. She is co-author (with J.Roberts, L.Grundy) of the unique A Thesaurus of Old English (1995 & 2000), and directed its web version, TOE Online. She is director of the Historical Thesaurus of English, a semantic classification of the English lexicon from Old English to the present (online version available in 2007; paper publication and version linked to the electronic Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, 2008). A pilot version, prepared under an AHRC ICT Strategy grant, can be seen on the Historical Thesaurus website. Professor Kay is currently working on two spin-offs from these projects for the Higher Education Academy English Subject Centre, ‘Learning and Teaching with the Thesaurus of Old English’ (completion December 2006), and ‘Word Webs: Exploring Vocabulary’ (completion November 2007).
Professor Kay initiated and maintains a research commitment to the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech (SCOTS) project, funded by the EPSRC and AHRC. This is the first corpus of its kind for contemporary Scots and Scottish English. She is also a member of the LICHEN project for minority languages at the University of Oulu, Finland. She is the author of grammar and EFL textbooks, computer programs in grammar, metrics and stylistics, and numerous articles on historical semantics and humanities computing. She has co-edited several volumes of papers, most recently Perspectives on the Older Scottish Tongue: a Celebration of DOST and Progress in Colour Studies 1: Linguistics, one of two volumes arising from the interdisciplinary ‘Progress in Colour Studies 2004’ conference which she co-chaired. Her current research is mainly concerned with issues arising from the Historical Thesaurus, focusing on applications of cognitive semantics in historical studies and the extension of computing techniques into historical linguistics. She co-edited the LILT (Languages into Language Teaching) project, a database of linguistic terminology and materials for use in education, and organises the SESLL programme of Continuing Professional Development courses for teachers.
Professor Kay is Convener of Scottish Language Dictionaries, the body responsible for the major academic dictionaries of Scots, including the online Dictionary of the Scots Language, and a member of the Steering Group for the Institute for the Languages of Scotland. She has recently served as an examiner at the University of Stavanger, Norway, and as Adviser to the Academy of Finland for the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English at the University of Helsinki. At Glasgow, she is a member and former convener of the Institute for the Historical Study of Language.