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

ORCID iDhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-6337-2632

Biography

I work primarily on the study of words, meaning, and effect in English, usually using the Historical Thesaurus of English, linguistic semantics, 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 (2020-2023) 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 linguistics and AI, 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. , Davies, M. and Dallachy, F. (2015) The Hansard Corpus 1803-2005. [Website]

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)

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. , 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)

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)

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

All publications

List by: Type | Date

Jump to: 2022 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007
Number of items: 62.

2022

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)

Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. and Struan, A. (2022) Writing with the Historical Thesaurus of English. Studies in the History of the English Language 12, Seattle, Washington, 19 - 21 May 2022.

2020

Alexander, M. (2020) A cognitive and quantitative approach to mathematical concretization. In: Tubbs, R., Jenkins, A. and Engelhardt, N. (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, M. and Dallachy, F. (2020) Lexis. In: Adolphs, S. and Knight, D. (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

Kay, C., Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. , Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2020) The Historical Thesaurus of English, second edition. [Website]

2019

Emmott, C. and Alexander, M. (2019) Manipulation in Agatha Christie's detective stories: rhetorical control and cognitive misdirection in creating and solving crime puzzles. In: Sorlin, S. (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

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. and Kay, C. (2018) "… all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air": Metaphorical connections in the history of English. In: Petré, P., Cuyckens, H. and D'hiedt, F. (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, A. and Alexander, M. (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, 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. , Dallachy, F. and Rayson, P. (2017) SAMUELS Semantically-Annotated Corpora. [Website]

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) 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. (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]

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (2015) Civilisation and Civility: a Case History. Glasgow Historical Association, Glasgow, Scotland, 14 Feb 2015.

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. , 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)

Alexander, M. , Davies, M. and Dallachy, F. (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.

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)

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

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)

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,

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (2010) Historical Language and Cultural Identity. Bonds and Borders: Identity, Imagination, Transformation, Glasgow, UK, 04 Jun 2010.

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (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. and Wild, C. (2010) Men, women, and children in the Historical Thesaurus: a case study. Documentation. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

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

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,

This list was generated on Thu Mar 23 20:14:34 2023 GMT.
Jump to: Articles | Book Sections | Research Reports or Papers | Conference or Workshop Item | Conference Proceedings | Website
Number of items: 62.

Articles

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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.

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,

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

Book Sections

Alexander, M. (2020) A cognitive and quantitative approach to mathematical concretization. In: Tubbs, R., Jenkins, A. and Engelhardt, N. (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, M. and Dallachy, F. (2020) Lexis. In: Adolphs, S. and Knight, D. (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

Emmott, C. and Alexander, M. (2019) Manipulation in Agatha Christie's detective stories: rhetorical control and cognitive misdirection in creating and solving crime puzzles. In: Sorlin, S. (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)

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. and Kay, C. (2018) "… all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air": Metaphorical connections in the history of English. In: Petré, P., Cuyckens, H. and D'hiedt, F. (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)

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)

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. (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

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

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

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. 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.

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)

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)

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)

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

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

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

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

Research Reports or Papers

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

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.

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.

Conference or Workshop Item

Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. and Struan, A. (2022) Writing with the Historical Thesaurus of English. Studies in the History of the English Language 12, Seattle, Washington, 19 - 21 May 2022.

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (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.

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (2015) Civilisation and Civility: a Case History. Glasgow Historical Association, Glasgow, Scotland, 14 Feb 2015.

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (2010) Historical Language and Cultural Identity. Bonds and Borders: Identity, Imagination, Transformation, Glasgow, UK, 04 Jun 2010.

Struan, A. and Alexander, M. (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.

Conference Proceedings

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. , 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. , 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,

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

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

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,

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. , 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)

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. (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,

Website

Kay, C., Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. , Roberts, J., Samuels, M. and Wotherspoon, I. (2020) The Historical Thesaurus of English, second edition. [Website]

Alexander, M. , Dallachy, F. and Rayson, P. (2017) SAMUELS Semantically-Annotated Corpora. [Website]

Alexander, M. , Davies, M. and Dallachy, F. (2017) Semantic EEBO. [Website]

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

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) The Historical Thesaurus Semantic Tagger. [Website]

Alexander, M. , Davies, M. and Dallachy, F. (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]

This list was generated on Thu Mar 23 20:14:34 2023 GMT.

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
  • English semantics and/or lexicology
  • The history of English, particularly through the digital humanities
  • Corpus linguistics 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
  • Stylistics, particularly applied to linguistic persuasion, popular fiction or heathcare narratives
  • The cognitive linguistics of English, including metaphor and conceptual blending

PhD researchers I currently work with and who have chosen to have a Glasgow webpage are listed below.

  • Bódig, Emma
    Articulating Womanhood: analysing gender, voice and legitim

Teaching

Generally, each year I convene my Honours course The Language of Laws (ENGLANG4060) 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 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. I convene the University's Academic Regulations Committee, and am a Senate Assessor for Student Conduct. 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) and Deputy Head of the School of Critical Studies.

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.


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