Dr Daria Izdebska
Dr Daria Izdebska
(Liverpool Hope University)
(Liverpool Hope University)
The workshop aims to introduce participants to the basic tenets of historical lexical semantics, particularly in relation to Old English vocabulary. It will show how a careful analysis of semantic fields in Old English can lead to a better understanding of Old English language, literature, and culture, as it will allow us to observe both concepts that were heavily lexicalized, and therefore particularly salient in Anglo-Saxon England. The workshop will enable participants to have hands-on experience in using the most recent online and digital resources, such as A Thesaurus of Old English, the Dictionary of Old English or the DOE Corpus, in order to equip them with practical skills in performing digitally-mediated lexical semantic analysis of Old English. These skills will be of interest not only to linguists, but also those interested in culture, history, literature and the history of ideas. The Old English Thesaurus in particular is an excellent resource as it allows us to investigate specific semantic fields (e.g. emotions, war, food, drink, animals, games, religion) and helps uncover conceptual structures and categorisations present in Old English. The vocabulary mined via thesauri and dictionaries will then be further investigated with the help of the DOE corpus, which will show the general distribution of lexical items in different text types, both poetic and prose, their clustering, and above all the contexts of their usage.
INFORMATION FOR PARTICIPANTS:
The participants should think about areas of vocabulary (semantic fields) that are of particular interest to them. It would also be good if the students could pre-register for the Dictionary of Old English on the Toronto website – it gives anyone 20 free login sessions per year, and we’ll use one of these logins during the workshop.
We will be looking primarily at:
A Thesaurus of Old English: https://oldenglishthesaurus.arts.gla.ac.uk
The Historical Thesaurus of English: https://ht.ac.uk
Dictionary of Old English and DOE Corpus https://www.doe.utoronto.ca/pages/index.html
Bosworth-Toller Dictionary http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz
IMPORTANT NOTE:
All workshop participants are kindly asked to bring an electronic device with them (such as a laptop or a tablet), if possible.
Of course, in case that could prove difficult or impossible for anyone, please rest assured that the organisers will come with their own devices, and we do believe that there is nothing more pleasant than teamwork in such cases.
Dr Daria Izdebska is a Lecturer in English Language at Liverpool Hope University, where she teaches a wide range of subjects, among others Old English, History of English Language, Research Methods and Digital Humanities. Previously, she worked as a Project and Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow, where she also completed her Ph.D. thesis on the semantics of anger in Old English (2015). Her main areas of interest include, but are not limited to, the history of emotions, cognitive lexical semantics, diachronic semantics, lexicology, corpus linguistics, and Old English language and literature. She is particularly keen to adopt interdisciplinary approaches which combine linguistic, literary and anthropological study.