Professor Marc Alexander
- Professor of English Linguistics (English Language and Linguistics)
telephone: 01413306501
email: Marc.Alexander@glasgow.ac.uk
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632Research interests
I work primarily on the study of words, meaning, and effect in English, usually using the Historical Thesaurus of English, cognitive 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 over a decade, helping to produce the 2009 Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, carrying out research on its database, and editing its second edition (in progress).
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 was also a co-investigator on the three-year AHRC-funded Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project (2012-2015, Principal Investigator Dr Wendy Anderson). I am currently part of the Glasgow branch of the AHRC-funded Linguistic DNA of Modern Thought project (2015-18, Principal Investigator Professor Susan Fitzmaurice of the University of Sheffield), which aims to analyse the development of key terms throughout the Early Modern period through looking at the rate of change of new lexical items in the language.
My other research interests centre around meaning, rhetoric, and reader manipulation in written texts. 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. 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 semantic interpretation of UK statute law.
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. 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 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.
Selected publications
Alexander, M. and Kay, C. (2014) The Spread of RED in the Historical Thesaurus of English. In: Anderson, W., Biggam, C. P., Hough, C. and Kay, C. (eds.) Colour Studies: A Broad Spectrum. John Benjamins: Amsterdam, pp. 126-139. ISBN 9789027212191 (doi:10.1075/z.191.08ale)
Alexander, M. , Kay, C., Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2015) The Historical Thesaurus of English. [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)
Emmott, C. and Alexander, M. (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
Alexander, M. and Davies, M. (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]
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
Alexander, M. and Struan, A. (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)
Grants
The research project grants I have held in since 2011 include the following:
- 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). (£80,510, AHRC grant AH/R007136/1)
- 2015-2018: The Linguistic DNA of Modern 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). (£751,206, 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 currently supervise ten research students.
I would be pleased to discuss supervising further research degrees within the following areas:
- Projects drawing on the Historical Thesaurus of English
- English semantics and/or lexicology
- Corpus and computational approaches to meaning
- The stylistic analysis of legal and political texts from Early Modern times to the present, including the interpretation of statute and case law
- The cognitive linguistics of English
- The study of language and persuasion
- Metaphor and conceptual blending in English
- Cognitive stylistics/poetics, particularly applied to popular fiction
Teaching
In 2017-18, I convene the Honours courses Semantics and Pragmatics (ENGLANG4052), Corpus Linguistics (ENGLANG4032), and Language of Laws (ENGLANG4060). I teach on these courses, and also teach English Words: History, Structure, and Meaning in English Language 2A (ENGLANG2004), Structure of Modern English in English Language 1A (ENGLANG1001), and parts of History of English (ENGLANG4037) and Contemporary Issues in Semantics (ENGLANG4031).
I have previously taught most of the components of modern English language and linguistics at a variety of levels, particularly in the areas of text analysis, semantics and pragmatics, spoken discourse studies, corpus linguistics, diachronic lexicology, forensic linguistics, and modern English grammar. At pre-Honours this has included the Structure of Modern English and Stylistics components for ENGLANG1001, Analysing Conversation and Varieties of English for ENGLANG1003, English Words: History, Structure, and Meaning for ENGLANG2004, and Language, Persuasion, and Authority for ENGLANG2004/5. 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 (ENGLANG4007), Semantic Change and Lexicology for History of English (ENGLANG4003), Discourse Markers, Pragmatic Theory, Conversation Analysis, Language and the Courtroom, and Media Discourse for Pragmatics and Spoken Discourse (ENGLANG4015), and Dictionaries, Semantic Space, Semantics and the Law, Conceptual Blending, and Linguistic Conceptualisation and Construal for ENGLANG4017 (Semantics of English).
I have previously run Level 1 and Level 2 English Language (ENGLANG1001, ENGLANG1002, ENGLANG1003, ENGLANG2004, ENGLANG2005), Digital Humanities for Language and Literature (ENGLANG4007, open to all students in the School of Critical Studies), Culture and English Language Teaching (ENGLANG4001), Pragmatics and Spoken Discourse (ENGLANG4015), Written Text and Narrative (ENGLANG4019), and the School of Critical Studies and College of Social Sciences PGT Research Training Courses.
Additional Information
I am currently Head of English Language & Linguistics and Deputy Head of the School of Critical Studies.
I am an elected member of the University Senate and the Council of Senate. I convene the University's Academic Regulations Committee, and am a Senate Assessor for Student Conduct. I sit on the Council of Senate Business Committee, the University's Academic Standards Committee, the College of Arts Building project board, and the School of Critical Studies Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee, in addition to some other administrative roles. 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.
Externally, I am a trustee of the Glasgow Educational and Marshall Trust, and a trustee and director of Scottish Language Dictionaries.
