M Lynne Murphy
Biographic Data
| ID | 3591808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Lynne Murphy |
| GIVEN NAMES | M Lynne |
| FAMILY NAME | Murphy |
| SIGNATURE | MURPHY M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0978-5380 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 27 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Separated by a common im/politeness marker
Comparative speech-act studies have found that British English directives tend to include the pragmatic marker please at about twice the rate of American English directives. Nevertheless, lexical please is often as frequent in American English corpora as in British ones – indicating that sincere directives are only part of this pragmatic marker’s story. This article reports on British and American please usage in the Corpus of Global Web-based En…
Dynamics of English gratitude expression
With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging) and/or make requests (directing) for…
Anatoly Liberman. 2022. Take My Word for It
What to do, lexicographically, with English idioms? The category is huge, diverse, variable, difficult to categorise, and a pain in the neck to organise. I suppose what one does is give the problem to Anatoly Liberman. The title and subtitle of his new book, Take My Word for It: A Dictionary of English Idioms, was no doubt chosen to appeal to a general audience, but it misleads. This is not simply a dictionary of what English idioms mean (as woul…
Ingrid Paulsen
Article Ingrid Paulsen: The emergence of American English as a discursive variety: Tracing enregisterment process in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers was published on November 1, 2023 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 57, issue s44-s1)
Nationality and ‘otherness’ in Keywords for Today
Routine politeness in American and British English requests
This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and …
British English? American English? Are there such things
In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English . These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy term…
(Un)separated by a common language
Interest in the differences between English in Britain (or more especially England) and the United States supports a small industry, of which I am a small part. But there are those who argue that the differences are so negligible that they are not worth investigating. One of these is University of Edinburgh Professor of General Linguistics Geoffrey Pullum, who wrote a post on the topic for the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Educati…
Minding your please s and thank-you s in Britain and the US
Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no . And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no ). In the American data, that number was 27%. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commi…
The differences behind the similarities, or
In the first article in this series (Murphy 2016), I recounted Geoff Pullum's (2014) dismissal of British-American linguistic differences as ‘mostly nouns’. From a theoretical linguist's position, nouns can seem simpler and less interesting than other parts of speech, since concrete noun senses are fairly self-contained. Compare a noun like cup to an adjective like big . You can picture a cup in and of itself, but in imagining big we need to thin…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Synonyms
This article uses corpus evidence to examine uses of the word synonym in two ways. First, it examines whether uses of synonym match common dictionary definitions of the word. This turns up both senses of synonym that are missing from general dictionaries and broadenings from the basic ‘sameness of meaning’ sense represented in most dictionaries. After reviewing user studies that discuss synonym searches, the article turns to the study of a web-de…
Antonyms in English
The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its constru…
Antonyms in context
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Dirk Geeraerts, Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Discourse functions of antonymy
Introduction
Antonyms in children's and child-directed speech
This article presents two studies based on a corpus of American English speech by and to five children from 2 to 5 years old. The first study investigates frequency of antonym co-occurrence in speakers' turns. The second examines the discourse-functional properties of those co-occurrences, with comparison to adult-directed adult English. We find: (1) children know/use antonyms at earlier ages than experimental studies have shown; (2) children use…
Politeness in Intercultural Email Communication
This paper presents initial results from analysis of data collected on the topic of politeness in intercultural email communication from a large cohort of Australian academic and general staff at an established metropolitan university. We were interested in the language used by these staff members while they conducted their initial email communication with their contacts overseas. The contacts overseas were, for example, fellow professional colle…
Using corpora to investigate antonym acquisition
In this study, a purpose-built corpus, containing both child-produced and child-directed speech, is used to conduct a longitudinal examination of antonym use among children from the age of two to five years old. Previous research has tended to approach antonym acquisition using either elicitation techniques or corpora of printed adult language. In contrast, this research focuses on the speech of preschool children in naturally-occurring interacti…
The Struggle to Breathe
The first sizeable cohort of people living with cystic fibrosis (CF) has now reached adulthood. Gradual improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease have increased life expectancy to approximately 32 years. Members of this cohort have lived all their lives near, at, or slightly beyond life expectancy. The authors tell the story of Lori Morris-Hughes, a 36-year old who balances the demands of work and family life with life-long termi…
Lexical Competence
Defining People
This paper examines problems in defining racial terminology in an age of international lexicography through a survey of South African English (SAfE) racial and ethnic terminology and its representation in English dictionaries used in South Africa. Rather than reflecting past apartheid attitudes and racial definitions, dictionaries for the South African public tend to ignore the most common South African senses of racial labels [terms] The deficit…
A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles
Fabrication d'un premier dictionnaire de la langue beng
Les AA. decrivent un projet d'elaboration d'un dictionnaire de la langue Beng, appartenant a la famille mande-sud des langues de l'Afrique de l'Ouest. Elles presentent les decisions qu'elles ont prises aux differentes etapes de la fabrication du dictionnaire, les manieres diverses dont elles ont prevu les dilemmes ethiques probables, et les reflexions actuelles sur les decisions critiques qu'elles ont prises puisqu'elles beneficient d'un recul de…
Beyond Names for Things
Using corpora to investigate antonym acquisition
In this study, a purpose-built corpus, containing both child-produced and child-directed speech, is used to conduct a longitudinal examination of antonym use among children from the age of two to five years old. Previous research has tended to approach antonym acquisition using either elicitation techniques or corpora of printed adult language. In contrast, this research focuses on the speech of preschool children in naturally-occurring interacti…
Discourse functions of antonymy
Routine politeness in American and British English requests
This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and …
Politeness in Intercultural Email Communication
This paper presents initial results from analysis of data collected on the topic of politeness in intercultural email communication from a large cohort of Australian academic and general staff at an established metropolitan university. We were interested in the language used by these staff members while they conducted their initial email communication with their contacts overseas. The contacts overseas were, for example, fellow professional colle…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Synonyms
This article uses corpus evidence to examine uses of the word synonym in two ways. First, it examines whether uses of synonym match common dictionary definitions of the word. This turns up both senses of synonym that are missing from general dictionaries and broadenings from the basic ‘sameness of meaning’ sense represented in most dictionaries. After reviewing user studies that discuss synonym searches, the article turns to the study of a web-de…
Introduction
The Lexicon in Acquisition
Fabrication d'un premier dictionnaire de la langue beng
Les AA. decrivent un projet d'elaboration d'un dictionnaire de la langue Beng, appartenant a la famille mande-sud des langues de l'Afrique de l'Ouest. Elles presentent les decisions qu'elles ont prises aux differentes etapes de la fabrication du dictionnaire, les manieres diverses dont elles ont prevu les dilemmes ethiques probables, et les reflexions actuelles sur les decisions critiques qu'elles ont prises puisqu'elles beneficient d'un recul de…
Beyond Names for Things
Focus on South Africa
Defining People
This paper examines problems in defining racial terminology in an age of international lexicography through a survey of South African English (SAfE) racial and ethnic terminology and its representation in English dictionaries used in South Africa. Rather than reflecting past apartheid attitudes and racial definitions, dictionaries for the South African public tend to ignore the most common South African senses of racial labels [terms] The deficit…
A Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles
Lexical Competence
Using corpora to investigate antonym acquisition
In this study, a purpose-built corpus, containing both child-produced and child-directed speech, is used to conduct a longitudinal examination of antonym use among children from the age of two to five years old. Previous research has tended to approach antonym acquisition using either elicitation techniques or corpora of printed adult language. In contrast, this research focuses on the speech of preschool children in naturally-occurring interacti…
The Struggle to Breathe
The first sizeable cohort of people living with cystic fibrosis (CF) has now reached adulthood. Gradual improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease have increased life expectancy to approximately 32 years. Members of this cohort have lived all their lives near, at, or slightly beyond life expectancy. The authors tell the story of Lori Morris-Hughes, a 36-year old who balances the demands of work and family life with life-long termi…
Politeness in Intercultural Email Communication
This paper presents initial results from analysis of data collected on the topic of politeness in intercultural email communication from a large cohort of Australian academic and general staff at an established metropolitan university. We were interested in the language used by these staff members while they conducted their initial email communication with their contacts overseas. The contacts overseas were, for example, fellow professional colle…
Antonyms in children's and child-directed speech
This article presents two studies based on a corpus of American English speech by and to five children from 2 to 5 years old. The first study investigates frequency of antonym co-occurrence in speakers' turns. The second examines the discourse-functional properties of those co-occurrences, with comparison to adult-directed adult English. We find: (1) children know/use antonyms at earlier ages than experimental studies have shown; (2) children use…
Discourse functions of antonymy
Introduction
Dirk Geeraerts, Theories of lexical semantics. Oxford
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Antonyms in English
The study of antonyms (or 'opposites') in a language can provide important insight into word meaning and discourse structures. This book provides an extensive investigation of antonyms in English and offers an innovative model of how we mentally organize concepts and how we perceive contrasts between them. The authors use corpus and experimental methods to build a theoretical picture of the antonym relation, its status in the mind and its constru…
Antonyms in context
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Synonyms
This article uses corpus evidence to examine uses of the word synonym in two ways. First, it examines whether uses of synonym match common dictionary definitions of the word. This turns up both senses of synonym that are missing from general dictionaries and broadenings from the basic ‘sameness of meaning’ sense represented in most dictionaries. After reviewing user studies that discuss synonym searches, the article turns to the study of a web-de…
British English? American English? Are there such things
In the last issue of English Today I argued that while the differences between American and British English may be small, they are innumerable, varied and interesting. But that article (and many of the things I write) invited the question of whether it even makes sense to talk of American English and British English . These labels are extremely problematic on geographic, linguistic and political grounds. Are we justified in using such sloppy term…
(Un)separated by a common language
Interest in the differences between English in Britain (or more especially England) and the United States supports a small industry, of which I am a small part. But there are those who argue that the differences are so negligible that they are not worth investigating. One of these is University of Edinburgh Professor of General Linguistics Geoffrey Pullum, who wrote a post on the topic for the Lingua Franca blog of the Chronicle of Higher Educati…
Minding your please s and thank-you s in Britain and the US
Probably my favourite study of American/British linguistic differences is Gail Jefferson's (2002) paper on no . And it turned out that she was right – but only for (her native) American English. Examining British telephone conversation data, Jefferson found that 87% of the tokens in response to negative statements were negative (usually no ). In the American data, that number was 27%. Affiliative no shows an emotional commitment, and people commi…
The differences behind the similarities, or
In the first article in this series (Murphy 2016), I recounted Geoff Pullum's (2014) dismissal of British-American linguistic differences as ‘mostly nouns’. From a theoretical linguist's position, nouns can seem simpler and less interesting than other parts of speech, since concrete noun senses are fairly self-contained. Compare a noun like cup to an adjective like big . You can picture a cup in and of itself, but in imagining big we need to thin…
Routine politeness in American and British English requests
This paper looks at the use and non-use of please in American and British English requests. The analysis is based on request data from two comparable workplace email corpora, which have been pragmatically annotated to enable retrieval of all request speech acts regardless of formulation. 675 requests are extracted from each of the two corpora; the behaviour of please is analyzed with regard to factors such as imposition level, sentence mood, and …
Nationality and ‘otherness’ in Keywords for Today
Ingrid Paulsen
Article Ingrid Paulsen: The emergence of American English as a discursive variety: Tracing enregisterment process in nineteenth-century U.S. newspapers was published on November 1, 2023 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 57, issue s44-s1)
Dynamics of English gratitude expression
With a focus on politicians’ and medical experts’ gratitude expressions in UK government COVID-19 briefings, this research describes how perspective and intensity were modulated in expressing gratitude to realise different pragmatic intentions. This corpus-assisted analysis finds that retrospective or prospective gratitude expression was adopted by the two British elite groups to build solidarity (encouraging) and/or make requests (directing) for…
Linguistics (23 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Psychology (17 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Lexicography and Language Studies (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (9 works) · linguistics and terminology studies (8 works) · History (6 works) · Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity (6 works)