Kathryn Allan joined UCL in 2008 and holds a lectureship in the history of English. She completed her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the English Language department at the University of Glasgow, where she also worked for several years as a part-time research assistant on the Historical Thesaurus of English, now published as the Oxford Thesaurus of the English Language. From 2004–2008 she was a lecturer at the University of Salford, where she was Programme Leader for the BA in English Language and Linguistics. She has also done transcription work for the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech and the Middle English Grammar project, and worked briefly as a part-time tutor at the University of Oxford. She is a member of the Philological Society, the International Society for the Linguistics of English, and the International Cognitive Linguistics Association, and a contributor to the Keywords Project, which will launch a website in late 2009 featuring new and updated entries in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s Keywords.

Research

Kathryn’s main research interests are in historical and cognitive semantics and lexicology, and these are themes in most of her work. She is particularly interested in the intra- and extra-linguistic factors in semantic change, and in tracing polysemy in terms of its relationship to social-cultural change; her monograph Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach, which uses data from the Historical Thesaurus of English, explores the motivation for metaphor and metonymy in the semantic field intelligence. She focuses on more recent shifts in lexical meaning as part of the Keywords Project. Much of her research uses the Oxford English Dictionary as a starting point, and her interest in methodological issues around this approach has led to a co-edited volume, Current Methods in Historical Semantics, which will be published with Mouton de Gruyter in the Topics in English Linguistics series. She is also co-editing another volume on Historical Cognitive Linguistics in Mouton’s Cognitive Linguistics Research series, and this brings together papers that focus on historical data within a cognitive linguistic framework.

Kathryn would be interested in supervising PhDs in the area of historical lexicology, lexical semantics and cognitive semantics.

Selected Publications

• Forthcoming. ‘Tracing metonymic polysemy through time: MATERIAL FOR OBJECT mappings in the OED’. In Winters. M., H. Tissari & K. Allan (eds.) Contributions to Historical Cognitive Linguistics: Syntax and Semantics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

• Forthcoming. ‘Using OED data as evidence’. In Allan, K. & J. Robinson (eds.) Current Methods in Historical Semantics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

• 2008. Metaphor and Metonymy: A Diachronic Approach. (Publications of the Philological Society). Oxford: Blackwell.

• 2007. ‘Excellence: a new keyword for education?’, Critical Quarterly 49.1: 54-78.

• 2006. ‘Glossary’. (141 pp.) Co-author Dr Philip Durkin, Oxford English Dictionary. In Brown, E.K. (ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd edition, vol. 14. Oxford: Elsevier.

• 2006. ‘On groutnolls and nog-heads: a case study of the interaction between culture and cognition in intelligence metaphors’. In Stefanowitsch, A. & S. Grondelaers (eds.) Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics. Vol. 1: Metaphor and Metonymy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp175-190.