Jean Aitchison
This biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification. (January 2009) |
Jean Aitchison | |
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Born | July 3, 1938 |
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Jean Margaret Aitchison (born 3 July 1938)[1] is a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include socio-historical linguistics; language and the mind; and language and the media.
Biography[]
Aitchison earned her MA from Cambridge, and an AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. She was an assistant lecturer in Greek at Bedford College London from 1961-65, lecturer and senior lecturer, and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics from 1965-92. She was the Rupert Murdoch Professor of language and communication at Oxford from 1993-2003, Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford from 1993-2003 (emeritus since 2003).[2] In 1996 she gave the BBC Reith lectures on The Language Web.[3] Professor Aitchison is a descendant of Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, lieutenant governor of the Punjab from 1882 to 1887 and founder of Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan.
Research[]
In 1987, Aitchison identified three stages that occur during a child's acquisition of vocabulary: labelling, packaging and network building.
- Labelling: First stage and involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer, e.g., understanding that “mummy” refers to the child’s mother.
- Packaging: Entails understanding a word’s range of meaning.
- Network Building: Involves grasping the connections between words: understanding that some words are opposite in meaning, e.g., understanding the relationship between hypernyms and hyponyms.
Key publications[]
- New Media Language (edited with Diana M. Lewis). London and New York: Routledge.
- Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. 3rd edition (1st edition 1987). Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 2003.[4][5]
- Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd edition (1st edition 1981). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. 4th edition (1st edition 1976). London and New York: Routledge, 1998.[6]
- The Language Web: The Power and Problem of Words. 1996 BBC Reith lectures. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Also, with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000.)
References[]
- ^ "Birthdays". The Guardian. Guardian Media. 3 July 2014. p. 33.
- ^ Debrett's People of Today http://www.debretts.com/people-of-today/profile/29538/Jean-Margaret-AITCHISON[permanent dead link]
- ^ The Reith Lectures. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmvwx
- ^ Review by: Richard Shillcock, Journal of Linguistics 24.2 (Sep., 1988), pp. 569-570.
- ^ Book Review by Lee Dembart, Well-Chosen Words on Linguistics :Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon by Jean Aitchison, The Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1988
- ^ EC Stewart, 1982, Book review-The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Helmut Esau. Hornbeam Press (1980), Language Sciences, p. 360.
External links[]
- Living people
- Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford
- Linguists from England
- Women linguists
- English non-fiction writers
- People educated at Wimbledon High School
- 1938 births
- Radcliffe College alumni
- British linguist stubs