About

This SNSF-funded project (https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10001311) aims at analysing and theorising the development of the Middle English lexicon. 

We focus on four lexical domains relating to key areas of medieval life in which both specialised practitioners and lay people were involved:

• Education 

• Law 

• Medicine 

• Religion 

The lexical data collected will be used to compile two databases: 

• The first database will complement the Bilingual Thesaurus of Everyday Life in Medieval England ( https://thesaurus.ac.uk/bth/), coordinated by our collaborators Louise Sylvester and Richard Ingham at Westminster and hosted in Glasgow. 

• The second database will be hosted in Zurich and will offer additional search options such as information on the dialect or the genre distribution of words. 

These databases will then be used to study diachronic (time), diatopic (region), and diaphasic (genre) variation in Middle English, and subsequently (re)evaluate established theories of lexical growth and obsolescence (the WAW factor), semantic change, lexical standardisation, and semantic hierarchies.  

Project Timespan: 

• 2025-2029