Professor Marc Alexander

Professor of English Linguistics (English Language and Linguistics)

telephone: 01413306501
email: Marc.Alexander@glasgow.ac.uk

ORCID iD https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632

Research 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., Guegan, X. and Guégan, X. (eds.) The British Abroad Since the Eighteenth Century, Volume 2: Experiencing Imperialism. Series: Britain and the world. Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke. ISBN 9781137304179

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.

All publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007

Number of items: 49.

2017

Piao, S., Dallachy, F., Baron, A., Demmen, J., Wattam, S., Durkin, P., McCracken, J., Rayson, P. and Alexander, M. (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, M. and Struan, A. (2017) Digital Hansard: Politics and the Uncivil. In: Digital Humanities 2017, Montréal, QC, Canada, 08-11 Aug 2017, pp. 378-380.

Fitzmaurice, S., Robinson, J., Hine, I., Dallachy, F., Rogers, K., Alexander, M. , Pidd, M., Mehl, S., Groves, M. and Aitken, B. (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, M. , Davies, M. and Dallachy, F. (2017) Semantic EEBO. [Website]

Fitzmaurice, S., Robinson, J. A., Alexander, M. , Hine, I. C., Mehl, S. and Dallachy, F. (2017) Reading into the past. In: Säily, T., Nurmi, A., Palander-Collin, M. and Auer, A. (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, S. M., Robinson, J., Alexander, M. , Hine, I., Mehl, S. and Dallachy, F. (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, M. (2016) Astronomical names. In: Hough, C. (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. and Alexander, M. (2016) Defamiliarisation and foregrounding: representing experiences of change of state and perception in neurological illness autobiographies. In: Sotirova, V. (ed.) The Bloomsbury Companion to Stylistics. Series: Bloomsbury companions. Bloomsbury: London. ISBN 9781441160058

2015

Kay, C. and Alexander, M. (2015) Diachronic and synchronic thesauruses. In: Durkin, P. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780199691630

Anderson, W. , Hough, C., Kay, C., Bramwell, E., Aitken, B., Hamilton, R. and Alexander, M. (2015) Metaphor Map of Old English. [Website]

Alexander, M. (2015) Dictionaries. In: Taylor, J. R. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Word. Oxford University Press: Oxford. ISBN 9780199641604

Anderson, W. , Hough, C., Kay, C., Bramwell, E., Aitken, B., Hamilton, R. and Alexander, M. (2015) Metaphor Map of English. [Website]

Alexander, M. , Baron, A., Dallachy, F., Piao, S., Rayson, P. and Wattam, S. (2015) Semantic tagging and early modern collocates. In: Corpus Linguistics 2015, Lancaster, England, 21-24 Jul 2015,

Alexander, M. , Baron, A., Dallachy, F., Piao, S., Rayson, P. and Wattam, S. (2015) The Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger. [Website]

Alexander, M. and Davies, M. (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]

Alexander, M. , Kay, C., Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2015) The Historical Thesaurus of English. [Website]

Wattam, S., Rayson, P., Alexander, M. and Anderson, J. (2015) Experiences with parallelisation of an existing NLP pipeline: tagging Hansard. Language Resources and Evaluation,

2014

Emmott, C. and Alexander, M. (2014) Foregrounding, burying and plot construction. In: Stockwell, P. and Whiteley, S. (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Stylistics. Series: Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, pp. 329-343. ISBN 9781107028876

Emmott, C., Alexander, M. 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, M. (2014) How can you see 470,000 words? Babel, 6,

Alexander, M. , Anderson, J., Baron, A., Dallachy, F., Kay, C., Piao, S. and Rayson, P. (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, M. and Anderson, W. (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, M. and Bramwell, E. (2014) Mapping metaphors of wealth and want: a digital approach. In: Mills, M., Pidd, M. and Ward, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012. Series: Studies in the digital humanities. The University of Sheffield.

Emmott, C. and Alexander, M. (2014) Schemata. In: Hühn, P., Meister, J. C., Pier, J. and Schmid, W. (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, J. , Cameron, C. and Alexander, M. (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, S., Rayson, P., Alexander, M. and Anderson, J. (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

Emmott, C., Sanford, A. and Alexander, M. (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. (2012) Patchworks and Field-Boundaries: Visualizing the History of English. In: Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg,

Alexander, M. and Anderson, J. (2012) The Hansard Corpus, 1803-2003. Other. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK.

Alexander, M. and Kay, C. (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. , Green, J. , 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. , Green, J. , 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. , 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. , Anderson, J., Green, J. 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., Sanford, A. and Alexander, M. (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. 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,

Alexander, M. 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. (2010) How to Use the Historical Thesaurus. Documentation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Kay, C. and Alexander, M. (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. and Alexander, M. (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. and Little, H.M. (2007) From conversation to conference: the cultural value of oral history. eSharp, 10,

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