Professor Marc Alexander
- Professor of English Linguistics (English Language & Linguistics)
telephone:
01413306501
email:
Marc.Alexander@glasgow.ac.uk
pronouns:
He/him/his
Room 502, English Language & Linguistics, 13 University Gardens (All mail to 12 University Gardens), Glasgow G12 8QH
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632Biography
I work primarily on the study of words, meaning, and effect in English, usually using the Historical Thesaurus of English, linguistic semantics, corpus linguistics, or approaches from the digital humanities.
I am the third Director of the Historical Thesaurus of English, following Professor Michael Samuels and Professor Christian Kay. I have been part of the Thesaurus team for two decades, helping to produce the 2009 first edition of the Thesaurus, published as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, carrying out research on its database, and editing its second edition (in progress). The Thesaurus in 2019 was awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for over fifty years of research into the history of English meanings.
I was Principal Investigator of the collaborative AHRC/ESRC-funded SAMUELS project (Semantic Annotation and Markup for Enhancing Lexical Searches, 2014-15) project, which used Thesaurus data to annotate words in text with their disambiguated meanings in order to open up new ways of digitally analysing language, and produced new versions of the Hansard Corpus and of EEBO. In 2019 I was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2020-2024) for a large-scale digital analysis of lexicalization and the evolution of meaning in the Thesaurus database.
I was also a co-investigator on the three-year AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project (2012-15, Principal Investigator Professor Wendy Anderson) and the investigator of the Glasgow branch of the AHRC-funded Linguistic DNA of Modern Thought project with Dr Fraser Dallachy (2015-18, Principal Investigator Professor Susan Fitzmaurice of the University of Sheffield), which aimed to analyse the linguistic and conceptual changes evident in the Early Modern period of English and which characterised the development of modernity.
I am at present co-investigator and deputy PI on the AHRC Towards A National Collection major Discovery Project Our Heritage, Our Stories (2021-24, Principal Investigator Professor Lorna Hughes), working with Dr Ewan Hannaford, and as well as assisting with project management, my part of the project focuses on the intersection of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence/machine learning, the use of linguistic ontologies in cultural heritage, and on language as a heritage object in its own right.
My other research interests centre around meaning, rhetoric, and reader manipulation in written texts and corpora. I created the Hansard Corpus 1803-2003 and have worked with Hansard editors in the House of Lords on the analysis of parliamentary discourse and style and the evolution of Hansard itself. I was part of the Hansard at Huddersfield project (2018-19, Principal Investigator Professor Lesley Jeffries, University of Huddersfield), and some of my Philip Leverhulme Prize projects use the Hansard Corpus. In addition to the discourse of Parliament, I also work on legal English and the linguistics of statutory and consitutional interpretation. As part of this, I was previously an international fellow of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies in Monticello, Virginia. I am presently developing an analysis of the discourse of power across two centuries of Hansard, and some work on the under-researched Mirror of Parliament.
I am also Director of STELLA, which is the UK's only dedicated computer laboratory for teaching English studies and a key site of pioneering work in computer-assisted learning and experimental digital research in language and literature for the past 30 years. As part of this role, I was co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Digital Humanities Data Hive project. In addition, I have also been part of the JISC-funded Enroller (2009-2011) and Parliamentary Discourse (2011-2012) interdisciplinary digital humanities projects (the former as part of HATII, both projects in conjunction with the Glasgow National eScience Centre and under the leadership of the previous STELLA Director Jean Anderson). Finally, I have also been part of psycholinguistic research related to the nature of narrative reading as a collaborator with the AHRC-funded Stylistics, Text Analysis and Cognitive Science project (Directors Dr Catherine Emmott and the late Professor Anthony J. Sanford). I also have published on the cognitive and persuasive rhetoric of detective fiction (particularly Agatha Christie), which applies the study of persuasion to condensed, self-contained, manipulative texts.
Publications
Selected publications
Kay, C., Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. , Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2020) The Historical Thesaurus of English, second edition. [Website]
Alexander, M. (2023) Speech in the British Hansard. In: Korhonen, M., Kotze, H. and Tyrkkö, J. (eds.) Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary Discourse across Time and Space. Series: Studies in corpus linguistics (111). John Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp. 17-53. ISBN 9789027214065 (doi: 10.1075/scl.111.01ale)
Alexander, M. and Struan, A. (2022) “In barbarous times and in uncivilized countries”: two centuries of the evolving uncivil in the Hansard Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 27(4), pp. 480-505. (doi: 10.1075/ijcl.22016.ale)
Emmott, C. and Alexander, M. (2018) Reliability, unreliability, reader manipulation and plot reversals: strategies for constructing and challenging the credibility of characters in Agatha Christie's detective fiction. In: Page, R., Busse, B. and Nørgaard, N. (eds.) Rethinking Language, Text and Context: Interdisciplinary Research in Stylistics in Honor of Michael Toolan. Series: Routledge studies in rhetoric and stylistics. Routledge: London, pp. 177-190. ISBN 9780815395768
Alexander, M. (2016) The metaphorical understanding of power and authority. In: Anderson, W., Bramwell, E. and Hough, C. (eds.) Mapping English Metaphor Through Time. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 191-207. ISBN 9780198744573 (doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744573.003.0012)
Alexander, M. , Davies, M. and Dallachy, F. (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]
Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. , Piao, S., Baron, A. and Rayson, P. (2015) Metaphor, popular science, and semantic tagging: Distant reading with the Historical Thesaurus of English. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, (doi: 10.1093/llc/fqv045)
All publications
Grants
The research project grants I have held since 2011 include the following:
- 2021-2024: Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people’s national collection, PI Professor Lorna Hughes (University of Glasgow), Co-Is Professor Marc Alexander, Professor Hannah Barker (University of Manchester), Dr Riza Batista-Navarro (Manchester), Professor Goran Nenadic (Manchester), and Pip Willcox (the National Archives). RAs and RSEs Dr Ewan Hannaford (Glasgow), Dr Diane Scott (Glasgow), and six others to be appointed. (£2,947,392, AHRC grant AH/W00321X/1)
- 2021-2022: Digital Humanities Data Hive, PI Professor Lorna Hughes (University of Glasgow), Co-Is Arthur Clune (University of Sheffield), Dr Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester), Professor Marc Alexander, Professor Hannah Barker (University of Manchester), Dr Riza Batista-Navarro (Manchester), Professor Goran Nenadic (Manchester), and Michael Pidd (University of Sheffield). RA Dr Ewan Hannaford (Glasgow). (£75,261, AHRC grant AH/W007584/1)
- 2020-2023: Philip Leverhulme Prize. (£100,000, Leverhulme Trust)
- 2019-2020: Digital aspects of Arcadia's giving in culture: a review. (With Professor Lonra Hughes, commissioned by the Arcadia Foundation)
- 2018-2019: 21st Century Reading: Text and Data Mining Skills for Scotland, PIs Robin Smith (National Library of Scotland) and Professor Marc Alexander. (£7,000, Royal Society of Edinburgh)
- 2018-2019: Hansard at Huddersfield, PI Professor Lesley Jeffries (University of Huddersfield), Co-Is Professor Marc Alexander and Dr Alex von Lunen (Huddersfield). (£99,829, AHRC grant AH/R007136/1)
- 2015-2018: The Linguistic DNA of Modern Western Thought, PI Professor Susan Fitzmaurice (University of Sheffield), Co-Is Professor Marc Alexander, Michael Pidd (Sheffield), and Dr Justyna Robinson (Sussex). RAs Dr Fraser Dallachy (Glasgow), Dr Iona Hine (Sheffield), and Dr Seth Mehl (Sheffield). (£757,167, AHRC grant AH/M00614X/1)
- 2014-2015: Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searches (SAMUELS), PI Dr Marc Alexander, Co-Is Jean Anderson (University of Glasgow), Professor Dawn Archer (University of Central Lancashire), Dr Alistair Baron (Lancaster University), Professor Jonathan Hope (University of Strathclyde), Professor Lesley Jeffries (University of Huddersfield), Professor Christian Kay (University of Glasgow), Dr Paul Rayson (Lancaster University), Dr Brian Walker (University of Huddersfield), and Professor Mark Davies (Brigham Young, USA). RAs Dr Fraser Dallachy (Glasgow), Dr Scott Piao (Lancaster), Dr Jane Demmen (Huddersfield), Bethan Malory (UCLAN), and Steven Wattam (Lancaster). Technician Brian Aitken (Glasgow). Collaborating partner: Oxford University Press and the Oxford English Dictionary. (£406,352, AHRC grant AH/L010062/1)
- 2012-2015: Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus, PI Dr Wendy Anderson, Co-Is Dr Marc Alexander, Professor Carole Hough and Professor Christian Kay. RA Dr Ellen Bramwell. (£387,702, AHRC grant AH/I02266X/1)
- 2011: Parliamentary Discourse. (£82,324, JISC eContent 2011, Strand A, with Jean Anderson)
- 2011: “The Language and the Sentiments of their Times”: Teaching the Language of Historical Text. PIs Dr Marc Alexander and Dr Andrew Struan (University of Virginia). (£3,599, HEA History Subject Centre)
- 2011: Scots Words and Place-names, PIs Prof Carole Hough and Jean Anderson. (£79,524, JISC eContent 2011, Strand B)
Supervision
I would be pleased to discuss supervising further research degrees within the following areas:
- Projects drawing on the Historical Thesaurus of English
- Corpus linguistics and computational/AI/ML approaches to meaning in English
- English semantics and/or lexicology
- Stylistics, particularly applied to linguistic persuasion, popular fiction or heathcare narratives
- The cognitive linguistics of English, including metaphor and conceptual blending
- The history of English, particularly through the digital humanities
- The stylistic analysis of legal and political texts from Early Modern times to the present, including the interpretation of statute and case law
- Please note I do not supervise work on language learning (L1 or L2) or cross-linguistic studies.
As with all academics, I regularly receive boilerplate emails from prospective students claiming to have read my webpage but clearly without having done so. To demonstrate you actually have, please begin your email to me with the name of the font used in the Glasgow subway system (you can Google this). I will not reply to other supervisory request emails.
Some doctoral researchers with whom I currently work (and who have chosen to have a Glasgow webpage) are listed below.
- Bodig, Emma
Constructing 'voice' and claiming the right to speak: an analysis of women's writing on the Scottish Gender Recognition Reform Bill.
Teaching
Generally, each alternate year I convene my Honours courses The Language of Laws (ENGLANG4060) and Dictionaties and Thesauruses (ENGLANG4066) and teach on this course and a range of other Honours and Postgraduate courses across the subject (including Semantics and Pragmatics (ENGLANG4052 and 5108), Semantics: Advanced Concepts (ENGLANG5083), Corpus Linguistics (ENGLANG4032 and 5094), History of English (ENGLANG4037 and 5097), and Lexicology and the Historical Thesaurus of English (ENGLANG5115), some of which I also convene).
At pre-Honours I teach ten weeks of English Words: History, Structure, and Meaning in English Language & Linguistics 2A; five weeks of Conversation Analysis in English Language & Linguistics 2B; six weeks of The Structure of Modern English and at times some of the ten weeks of Language, Persuasion, and Authority in English Language 1A. I have been Highly Commended for the Student Representative Council's prize for the best teacher in the College of Arts.
I have previously taught most of the components of modern English language and linguistics at a variety of levels, particularly in the areas of historical linguistics, lexicology, text analysis, semantics, pragmatics, legal language, spoken discourse studies, corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, and modern English grammar. At pre-Honours this has included the Structure of Modern English, Stylistics, Analysing Conversation, Varieties of English, English Words: History, Structure, and Meaning, and Language, Persuasion, and Authority lecture series. At Honours, I have taught Corpus Linguistics, Semantic Prosody, Distant Reading, Authorship and Stylometry, Natural Language Processing, and Copyright Law for Digital Humanities for Language and Literature; Semantic Change, History of Lexicography, and Lexicology for History of English; Discourse Markers, Pragmatic Theory, Conversation Analysis, Language and the Courtroom, and Media Discourse for Pragmatics and Spoken Discourse; and Dictionaries, Semantic Space, Semantics and the Law, Conceptual Blending, and Linguistic Conceptualisation and Construal for Semantics of English.
I have previously run Level 1 and Level 2 English Language & Linguistics, Digital Humanities for Language and Literature, Culture and English Language Teaching, Pragmatics and Spoken Discourse, Written Text and Narrative, Semantics and Pragmatics, Corpus Linguistics, Language of Laws, and the School of Critical Studies and College of Social Sciences PGT Research Training Courses.
Additional information
I am an elected member of the University Senate and convene the University's Academic Regulations Committee. I sit on the Senate Business Committee, the University Academic Standards Committee, the Education Policy and Strategy Committee, and hold some other administrative roles. I was previously Head of English Language & Linguistics (2016-2019), Deputy Head of the School of Critical Studies, and a Senate Assessor for Academic Conduct.
I convene the STELLA and Historical Thesaurus Prize Committees and the Historical Thesaurus Scholarship Committee. I also jointly convene the University's Digital Humanities Network with Professor Lorna Hughes.
I am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts.
Externally, I sit on the Advisory Board of the Oxford English Dictionary, am a trustee of the Glasgow Educational and Marshall Trust, and am a trustee and the Chair of the Board of Governors of Dictionaries of the Scots Language, the national dictionary of Scotland.
