105 research outputs found
Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus: a new resource for investigating metaphor in names
The AHRC-funded ‘Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus’ project has traced the development of
metaphor in English from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day using the unique evidence base of the
Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. The Historical Thesaurus organises the contents of the
OED semantically, making it possible to see how vocabulary for any given concept has developed over time.
One of the major outputs of the Mapping Metaphor project is the online Metaphor Map, which can be used to
investigate metaphor in names and is freely available at: http://mappingmetaphor.arts.gla.ac.uk/
On homonymy and polysemy in place-names
The linguistic term homonymy is used within toponomastics to refer to place-names with the same modern form
but different origins. Examples include Oxton, Newton and Maryburgh in various parts of the British Isles, and
Cambridge in various parts of the world. However, homonymy is random, whereas place-name doublets are
motivated in a variety of ways, some of them closer to the linguistic phenomenon of polysemy. The four
examples cited above each illustrates a different process of development. Recent work within linguistics has
focused on the interface between homonymy and polysemy, leading to new insights that may also be relevant to
onomastics. The broad terms homonymy and polysemy are inadequate to express the range of relationships
represented by place-name doublets
Scots in the community: place-names and social networking
This paper reports on the project Scots Words and Place-names (SWAP), which is designed to explore the
innovative potential of integrated online community engagement methods in the study of language and of placenames.
Funded from March to November 2011 by JISC (Joint Information Systems Network), it is a
collaboration between the University of Glasgow Enroller Project, Scottish Language Dictionaries and the
Scottish Place-Name Society. The project aims to engage the public in an exploration of language use in
present-day Scotland, focusing on the Scots vernacular
The migration of Old English to Scotland: place-name evidence for early Northumbrian settlement in Berwickshire
No abstract available
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