Biographical info: Billy Clark is Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Northumbria. His interests span different areas of research on linguistic and non-linguistic meaning, including linguistic semantics, pragmatics, prosodic meaning, stylistics, multimodal meaning and semantic change. In this talk, he will consider some of the ways in which work on pragmatic inference can be applied in accounting for the production, interpretation and evaluation of literary and other texts. He will go on to explore the ways in which some texts cause interpretative problems for audiences, varying responses to these texts, and how this relates to the problematic notion of ‘literariness’.

Writing an abstract for this talk is a MAEL Research Methods Assignment.

Biographical info: Lynda Mugglestone is Professor of the History of English at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on the history of English, and with particular reference to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lexicography and lexical history, and the history of spoken English. Publications include Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol (new ed, 2007), Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (2005), and Dictionaries: A Very Short Introduction (2011). She is editor of The Oxford History of English (revised ed. 2012) and, with Freya Johnston, she edited Samuel Johnson: The Arc of the Pendulum (OUP, 2012). Her most recent book is Samuel Johnson and the Journey into Words (2015) which has just come out in paperback. Since 2014, she has been working on the English Words in War-Time project, which is the subject of her forthcoming book.

Writing an abstract for this talk is a MAEL Research Methods Assignment.