Subject Taster Event - English Language

Changing Words, Changing Thoughts: the Online Historical Thesaurus
The completion of the monumental Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary was a linguistic breakthrough in investigating the history of the lexicon of English. Now that the Historical Thesaurus is freely available online, it provides a wealth of linguistic and cultural knowledge, waiting to be discovered by anyone with access to the internet. It allows us to look not only at changes at the word level (semantic, lexical) but also to trace developments of entire semantic fields. It is thus a record not only of language but also of historical and cultural changes and the ways in which thought patterns developed over time. This session will provide an introduction on how to use the thesaurus for investigating linguistic issues, particularly changes to semantic and lexical fields, including both a general overview of the resource and several illustrative case studies; the session will also build and expand on the students’ knowledge of aspects of semantic and lexical change, and the history of English from 1500 onwards, though it will also refer to Old and Middle English.