Dr Fraser Dallachy
- Lecturer in the Historical Thesaurus of English (English Language & Linguistics)
- Tutor - CERT HE (External Relations)
telephone: 01413308394
email: Fraser.Dallachy@glasgow.ac.uk
Research interests
My primary interests are in historical linguistics and the use of corpus linguistic methodologies for research into historical forms of language. I have worked as a Research Associate on the SAMUELS (Semantic Annotation and Mark-Up for Enhancing Lexical Searching) project which integrated the Historical Thesaurus of English into a semantic tagging software pipeline, and on the Linguistic DNA project which is developing a means of automatically identifying the emergence of concepts in historical text. I have additional interests in the physical objects - manuscripts and early printed books - from which we draw our knowledge of historical language, and catalogued the manuscripts and investigated the likely audience of a medieval didactic poem for my PhD research. I am also interested in pragmatics and stylistics particularly in the fields of 'believability', with special interest in the linguistic traits that increase the probability that ideas in texts will either be taken up and passed on, or rejected by their audience.
Teaching
I teach on the History of English and Corpus Linguistics Honours courses in English Language & Linguistics (ELL), covering subjects such as lexical, semantic, grammatical, and phonological change in the history of the language, and the means by which text can be marked-up and processed to enable computational analysis of these patterns. I also lecture on Early Modern English for the ELL Level 2 course, have contributed to the Classics 'Approaching the Ancient World through Text' Masters course, and will be contributing lectures on Textual Analysis to Information Studies Level 1. Additionally, I teach for the Centre for Open Studies and will be running a dayschool on present-day uses of the Latin language in April 2018.
Additional Information
I am Deputy Director of the Historical Thesaurus of English, and am currently working with colleagues here in Glasgow and at the Oxford English Dictionary to update the Thesaurus to its 2nd edition, adding new words, senses, and improved dating to the resource. As part of this I supervise undergraduate work as project assistants and research scholarship students.
