Professor Marc Alexander

Professor of English Linguistics (English Language & Linguistics)

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

Biography

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 deputy PI on the AHRC Towards A National Collection major Discovery Project Our Heritage, Our Stories (2021-25, Principal Investigator Professor Lorna Hughes), 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. 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.

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.

Research interests

Research groups

Modern English Language & Linguistics

Publications

Selected publications

Kay, Christian, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Roberts, Jane, Samuels, Michael and Wotherspoon, Irene (2020) The Historical Thesaurus of English, second edition. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2023) Speech in the British Hansard. In: Korhonen, Minna, Kotze, Haidee and Tyrkkö, Jukka (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, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 (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, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (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, Ruth, Busse, Beatrix and Nørgaard, Nina (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, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2016) The metaphorical understanding of power and authority. In: Anderson, Wendy, Bramwell, Ellen and Hough, Carole (eds.) Mapping English Metaphor Through Time. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 191-207. ISBN 9780198744573 (doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198744573.003.0012)

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Davies, Mark and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Piao, Scott, Baron, Alistair and Rayson, Paul (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

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

Number of items: 74.

2024

Hannaford, E. D. et al. (2024) Our heritage, our stories: developing AI tools to link and support community-generated digital cultural heritage. Journal of Documentation, 80(5), pp. 1133-1147. (doi: 10.1108/JD-03-2024-0057)

Hughes, Lorna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8928-0341, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Bartliff, Zoe ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1644-3151 (2024) Our Heritage, Our Stories. One step up: the importance of failure in a large-scale DH project at the crossroads of disciplines and institutions. DH2024, Washington, D.C., USA, 05-10 Aug 2024.

Hannaford, Ewan D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205, Benkhedda, Youcef, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Nenadic, Goran and Batista-Navarro, Riza (2024) Refining Predicates for Relation Extraction through Thesaurus Integration. In: YODA: ContemporarY Ontologies for Digital Archives Workshop, Enschede, The Netherlands, 15-19 July 2024,

Emmott, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2024) “You see, but you do not observe”: sensory manipulation and sense-making in the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. In: Pillière, Linda and Sorlin, Sandrine (eds.) Style and Sense(s). Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, pp. 125-148. ISBN 9783031548833 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-54884-0_6)

Hannaford, Ewan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2024) Linguistic diversity in institutional collections: Beyond preservation to valorisation. International Journal of Language Studies, 18(2), pp. 91-112. (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.10475279)

2023

Hannaford, Ewan ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Hughes, Lorna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8928-0341 and Lewis, Rhiannon (2023) Our Heritage, Our Stories: Democratising the UK National Collection. Digital Humanities 2023, Graz, 10-14 Jul 2023. p. 565.

Hannaford, Ewan D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205, Lewis, Rhiannon, Hughes, Lorna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8928-0341 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2023) Our Heritage, Our Stories - DH2023 conference poster. DH2023: Collaboration as Opportunity, Graz, Austria, 10-14 July 2023.

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Broad, Jane, Hutcheson, Jenny and Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 (2023) A Conductive Alloy: A 'Whole Institution' Approach to Student (Mis)Conduct. In: International Conference on Education and New Developments (END 2023), Lisbon, Portugal, 24-26 Jun 2023, pp. 292-295. ISBN 9789893510636

Hughes, Lorna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8928-0341, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Barker, Hannah, Batista-Navarro, Riza, Hannaford, Ewan D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205, Nenandic, Goran and Willcox, Pip (2023) Second Report - Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and Searching Community-Generated Digital Content to Develop the People's National Collection. Project Report. Zenodo, University of Glasgow, University of Manchester. (doi: 10.5281/ZENODO.8010441).

Emmott, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Marszalek, Agnes (2023) Schema theory in stylistics. In: Burke, Michael (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Second Edition. Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, pp. 284-299. ISBN 9780367567491 (doi: 10.4324/9780367568887-20)

2022

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 and Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 (2022) Writing with the Historical Thesaurus of English. Studies in the History of the English Language 12, Seattle, Washington, 19 - 21 May 2022.

Hughes, Lorna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8928-0341, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Barker, Hannah, Batista-Navarro, Riza, Hannaford, Ewan D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205, Nenandic, Goran and Willcox, Pip (2022) First Report - Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection. Project Report. Zenodo. (doi: 10.5281/ZENODO.7152510).

2020

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2020) A cognitive and quantitative approach to mathematical concretization. In: Tubbs, Robert, Jenkins, Alice and Engelhardt, Nina (eds.) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics. Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, pp. 589-608. ISBN 9783030554774 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-55478-1_32)

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2020) Lexis. In: Adolphs, Svenja and Knight, Dawn (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of English Language and Digital Humanities. Series: Routledge handbooks in English language studies. Routledge: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY, pp. 164-184. ISBN 9781138901766

2019

Emmott, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2019) Manipulation in Agatha Christie's detective stories: rhetorical control and cognitive misdirection in creating and solving crime puzzles. In: Sorlin, Sandrine (ed.) Stylistic Manipulation of the Reader in Contemporary Fiction. Series: Advances in stylistics. Bloomsbury: London, pp. 195-214. ISBN 9781350062962 (doi: 10.5040/9781350062993.0016)

2018

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Kay, Christian (2018) "… all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air": Metaphorical connections in the history of English. In: Petré, Peter, Cuyckens, Hubert and D'hiedt, Frauke (eds.) Sociocultural Dimensions of Lexis and Text in the History of English. Series: Current issues in linguistic theory (343). John Benjamins Publishing Company: Amsterdam ; Philadelphia, pp. 61-76. ISBN 9789027200792 (doi: 10.1075/cilt.343.03ale)

Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2018) The Language and Sentiments of their Times: Teaching the Language of Eighteenth-Century Text. 49th American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL, USA, 22-25 Mar 2018.

2017

Piao, Scott, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Baron, Alistair, Demmen, Jane, Wattam, Steve, Durkin, Philip, McCracken, James, Rayson, Paul and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2017) A time-sensitive historical thesaurus-based semantic tagger for deep semantic annotation. Computer Speech and Language, 46, 113 - 135. (doi: 10.1016/j.csl.2017.04.010)

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 (2017) Digital Hansard: Politics and the Uncivil. In: Digital Humanities 2017, Montréal, QC, Canada, 08-11 Aug 2017, pp. 378-380.

Fitzmaurice, Susan, Robinson, Justyna, Hine, Iona, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Rogers, Kathryn, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Pidd, Michael, Mehl, Seth, Groves, Matthew and Aitken, Brian (2017) The Seven Words of the Virgin: Identifying Change in the Discourse Context of the Concept of Virginity in Early Modern English. In: Digital Humanities 2017, Montréal, QC, Canada, 08-11 Aug 2017, pp. 225-227.

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Davies, Mark and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2017) Semantic EEBO. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 and Rayson, Paul (2017) SAMUELS Semantically-Annotated Corpora. [Website]

Fitzmaurice, Susan, Robinson, Justyna A., Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Hine, Iona C., Mehl, Seth and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2017) Reading into the past. In: Säily, Tanja, Nurmi, Arja, Palander-Collin, Minna and Auer, Anita (eds.) Exploring Future Paths for Historical Sociolinguistics. Series: Advances in historical sociolinguistics, 7 (7). John Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp. 53-82. ISBN 9789027200860 (doi: 10.1075/ahs.7.03fit)

Fitzmaurice, Susan Mary, Robinson, Justyna, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Hine, Iona, Mehl, Seth and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2017) Linguistic DNA: investigating conceptual change in early modern English discourse. Studia Neophilologica, 89(Supl 1), pp. 21-38. (doi: 10.1080/00393274.2017.1333891)

2016

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2016) Astronomical names. In: Hough, Carole (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming. Series: Oxford handbooks in linguistics. Oxford University Press: Oxford, pp. 628-635. ISBN 9780199656431 (doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199656431.013.3)

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2016) Defamiliarisation and foregrounding: representing experiences of change of state and perception in neurological illness autobiographies. In: Sotirova, Violeta (ed.) The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. Series: Bloomsbury companions. Bloomsbury: London. ISBN 9781441160058

2015

Kay, Christian and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2015) Diachronic and synchronic thesauruses. In: Durkin, Philip (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199691630

Anderson, Wendy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3188-4876, Hough, Carole ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4925-3450, Kay, Christian, Bramwell, Ellen, Aitken, Brian, Hamilton, Rachael and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2015) Metaphor Map of Old English. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2015) Dictionaries. In: Taylor, John R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Word. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780199641604

Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2015) Civilisation and Civility: a Case History. Glasgow Historical Association, Glasgow, Scotland, 14 Feb 2015.

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Baron, Alistair, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Piao, Scott, Rayson, Paul and Wattam, Stephen (2015) Semantic tagging and early modern collocates. In: Corpus Linguistics 2015, Lancaster, England, 21-24 Jul 2015,

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Baron, Alistair, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Piao, Scott, Rayson, Paul and Wattam, Steven (2015) The Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Davies, Mark and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Kay, Christian, Roberts, Jane, Samuels, Michael and Wotherspoon, Irene (2015) The Historical Thesaurus of English. [Website]

Wattam, Stephen, Rayson, Paul, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Anderson, Jean (2015) Experiences with parallelisation of an existing NLP pipeline: tagging Hansard. Language Resources and Evaluation,

2014

Emmott, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2014) Foregrounding, burying and plot construction. In: Stockwell, Peter and Whiteley, Sara (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Series: Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 329-343. ISBN 9781107028876

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407, Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Marszalek, A. (2014) Schema theory in stylistics. In: Burke, M. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Stylistics. Series: Routledge Handbooks in English Language Studies. Routledge: London, pp. 268-283. ISBN 9780415527903

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2014) How can you see 470,000 words? Babel, 6,

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Anderson, Jean, Baron, Alistair, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Kay, Christian, Piao, Scott and Rayson, Paul (2014) Metaphor, popular science and semantic tagging: distant reading with the historical thesaurus of English. In: Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, 7-12 Jul 2014,

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Anderson, Wendy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3188-4876 (2014) "Civilization arranged in chronological strata": a digital approach to the English semantic space. In: Digital Humanities 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, 7-12 Jul 2014,

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Bramwell, Ellen (2014) Mapping metaphors of wealth and want: a digital approach. In: Mills, Mills, Pidd, Michael and Ward, Esther (eds.) Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012. Series: Studies in the digital humanities. The University of Sheffield.

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Kay, Christian (2014) The Spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English. In: Anderson, Wendy, Biggam, Carole P., Hough, Carole and Kay, Christian (eds.) Colour Studies: A Broad Spectrum. John Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp. 126-139. ISBN 9789027212191 (doi: 10.1075/z.191.08ale)

Emmott, Catherine ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2014) Schemata. In: Hühn, Peter, Meister, Jan Christoph, Pier, John and Schmid, Wolf (eds.) Handbook of Narratology, 2nd ed. Series: De Gruyter handbook, 1. de Gruyter: Berlin, pp. 756-764. ISBN 9783110316346 (doi: 10.1515/9783110316469.756)

Singer, Jeremy ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9462-6802, Cameron, Callum and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2014) Programming Language Feature Agglomeration. In: Workshop on Programming Language Evolution 2014 (PLE14), Uppsala, Sweden, 28 Jul 2014, pp. 11-15. ISBN 9781450328876 (doi: 10.1145/2717124.2717128)

Wattam, Stephen, Rayson, Paul, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Anderson, Jean (2014) Experiences with Parallelisation of an Existing NLP Pipeline: Tagging Hansard. In: 9th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), Reykjavik, Iceland, 26-31 May 2014, pp. 4093-4096. ISBN 9782951740884

2013

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Struan, A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 (2013) 'In countries so unciviliz'd as those?': the language of incivility and the British experience of the world. In: Farr, M. and Guégan, X. (eds.) The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2: Experiencing Imperialism. Series: Britain and the world. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, pp. 232-249. ISBN 9781137304179 (doi: 10.1057/9781137304186_13)

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407, Sanford, A. and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2013) Rhetorical control of readers' attention: psychological and stylistic perspectives on foreground and background in narrative. In: Bernaerts, L., de Geest, D., Herman, L. and Vervaeck, B. (eds.) Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative. Series: Frontiers of narrative. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln, NE, USA, pp. 39-57. ISBN 9780803244818

2012

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2012) Patchworks and Field-Boundaries: Visualizing the History of English. In: Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg,

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Anderson, J. (2012) The Hansard Corpus, 1803-2003. Other. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Kay, Christian (2012) A digital approach to sound symbolism in English: evidence from the historical thesaurus. In: Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg, Germany, 16-22 Jul 2012,

2011

Alexander, M. (2011) The various forms of civilization arranged in chronological strata: manipulating the HTOED. In: Adams, M. and Imartino, G. (eds.) Cunning Passages, Contrived Corridors: Unexpected Essays in the History of Lexicography. Series: Lexicography worldwide (11). Polimetrica Press: Monza, Italy. ISBN 9788876992070

Anderson, J., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Green, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1154-0945, Sarwar, M. and Sinnott, R. (2011) Enroller: a grid-based research platform for English and Scots language. In: Digital Humanities 2011, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, 19-22 Jun 2011,

Anderson, J., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Green, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1154-0945, Sarwar, M., Sinnott, R. and Ren, R. (2011) ENROLLER: An Enhanced Repository for Language and Literature Researchers. Other. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.

Anderson, J., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Kay, C. and Sarwar, M. (2011) Data mining and search enhancements using the Historical Thesaurus of English. In: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Search and Mining Entity-relationship Data, Glasgow, 24-28 Oct 2011, pp. 27-28. (doi: 10.1145/2064988.2065000)

Sarwar, M.S., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Anderson, J., Green, J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1154-0945 and Sinnott, R.O. (2011) Implementing MapReduce over language and literature data over the UK National Grid Service. In: 7th International Conference on Emerging Technologies (ICET), Islamabad, Pakistan, 5-6 Sep 2011, (doi: 10.1109/ICET.2011.6048475)

2010

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407, Sanford, A. and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) Scenarios, characters' roles and plot status: readers' assumptions and writers' manipulations of assumptions in narrative texts. In: Eder, J., Jannidis, F. and Schneider, R. (eds.) Characters in Fictional Worlds: Understanding Imaginary Beings in Literature, Film and Other Media. Series: Revisionen/Grundbegriffe der Literaturetheorie (3). De Gruyter, pp. 377-399. ISBN 9783110232417

Sarwar, M., Sinnott, R., Anderson, J., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Green, J. (2010) An e-Research Infrastructure for Language and Literature Research. In: UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2010, Cardiff, Wales, 13-16 September 2010,

Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) Historical Language and Cultural Identity. Bonds and Borders: Identity, Imagination, Transformation, Glasgow, UK, 04 Jun 2010.

Struan, Andrew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4858-9988 and Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) Expressions of Civilisation and Colonisation in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. From the Grand Tour to Mass Tourism: The Modern History of the British Abroad, Newcastle, UK, 01-02 Apr 2010.

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Wild, C. (2010) Men, women, and children in the Historical Thesaurus: a case study. Documentation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) Detective fiction, plot construction, and reader manipulation: rhetorical control and cognitive misdirection in Agatha Christie's Sparkling Cyanide. In: McIntyre, D. and Busse, B. (eds.) Language and Style: In Honour of Mick Short. Palgrave Macmillan: Houndmills, Basingstoke, pp. 328-346. ISBN 9780230231566

Kay, C. and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) How to Use the Historical Thesaurus. Documentation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Kay, C. and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) Life after the historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 31, pp. 107-112.

2009

Alexander, M. (2009) Rhetorical structure and reader manipulation in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Philology, 39, pp. 13-27.

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2009) Schemata. Living Handbook of Narratology,

2008

Alexander, M. (2008) The lobster and the maid: scenario-dependence and reader manipulation in Agatha Christie. In: Annual Conference of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA), Sheffield, UK, 23-26 July 2008,

2007

Stewart, F.M., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Little, H.M. (2007) From conversation to conference: the cultural value of oral history. eSharp, 10,

This list was generated on Fri Jul 18 09:23:30 2025 BST.

Number of items: 74.

Articles

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2014) How can you see 470,000 words? Babel, 6,

Alexander, M. (2009) Rhetorical structure and reader manipulation in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Miscelanea: A Journal of English and American Philology, 39, pp. 13-27.

Emmott, C. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2394-2407 and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2009) Schemata. Living Handbook of Narratology,

Stewart, F.M., Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Little, H.M. (2007) From conversation to conference: the cultural value of oral history. eSharp, 10,

Book Sections

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2015) Dictionaries. In: Taylor, John R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Word. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780199641604

Research Reports or Papers

Hughes, Lorna ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8928-0341, Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Barker, Hannah, Batista-Navarro, Riza, Hannaford, Ewan D. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6657-4205, Nenandic, Goran and Willcox, Pip (2022) First Report - Our Heritage, Our Stories: Linking and searching community-generated digital content to develop the people's national collection. Project Report. Zenodo. (doi: 10.5281/ZENODO.7152510).

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Anderson, J. (2012) The Hansard Corpus, 1803-2003. Other. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 and Wild, C. (2010) Men, women, and children in the Historical Thesaurus: a case study. Documentation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Kay, C. and Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2010) How to Use the Historical Thesaurus. Documentation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Conference or Workshop Item

Conference Proceedings

Alexander, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632 (2012) Patchworks and Field-Boundaries: Visualizing the History of English. In: Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg,

Website

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Davies, Mark and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2017) Semantic EEBO. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 and Rayson, Paul (2017) SAMUELS Semantically-Annotated Corpora. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Baron, Alistair, Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565, Piao, Scott, Rayson, Paul and Wattam, Steven (2015) The Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Davies, Mark and Dallachy, Fraser ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8694-3565 (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]

Alexander, Marc ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632, Kay, Christian, Roberts, Jane, Samuels, Michael and Wotherspoon, Irene (2015) The Historical Thesaurus of English. [Website]

This list was generated on Fri Jul 18 09:23:30 2025 BST.

Grants

The research project grants I have held since 2011 include the following:

2021-2025: 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)
2020-2024: 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.

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.

At pre-Honours I teach six weeks of The Structure of Modern English, four weeks of Meaning in English Language 1A, ten weeks of English Words: History, Structure, and Meaning in English Language & Linguistics 2A, and five weeks of Conversation Analysis in English Language & Linguistics 2B. 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.

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 the Learning, Teaching, and Student Experience Convener for the School of Critical Studies.

I convene the University's Academic Regulations Committee and sit on the Academic Standards Committee and a range of other committees. 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 am a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the English Association, the Society of Antiquaries, 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.

2017b

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Professor Marc Alexander

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Conference or Workshop Item

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