HTE

Members of the Department

• Prof Christian Kay (Director of Historical Thesaurus)
• Mrs Irené A W Wotherspoon (Senior Research Assistant)
• Mrs Cerwyss O'Hare (Research Assistant)
• Dr I E Reay (Research Assistant)
• Mrs Lesley A Haughton (Research Assistant)
• Mrs Flora Edmonds (Database Officer)
• Mr Ian Hamilton (Computer Assistant)
• Mr Gerry McBride (IT Trainer)

Information about Staff

Professor Christian J Kay, MA, AM, DipGenLing

• Contemporary and historical semantics and syntax
• History of the English language
• Lexicology and lexicography, especially thesauri
• The use of computers in teaching and research

Co-editor of A Thesaurus of Old English and director of the Historical Thesaurus of English. Author of grammar and EFL textbooks, computer programs in grammar, metrics and stylistics, and articles on thesauri and humanities computing. Current research is mainly concerned with the Historical Thesaurus.

Irené A W Wotherspoon, MA, MLitt (Senior Research Assistant)

Responsibility for classification, editing and the development of the database.

Publications

"The Historical Thesaurus of English",The STELLA Symposium, ed. J. G. Anderson & S. Lee, Oxford, CTI Centre,1991, 13-16.

"Historical Thesaurus Database Using Ingres", Literary and Linguistic Computing, 4, 1992, 218-225.

With Christian J Kay and Louise Sylvester, "One Thesaurus leads to Another". Lexis and texts in Early English. Studies presented to Jane Roberts, (Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2001).

"Origin of thill ", Notes and Queries Vol. 247, June 2002, 188-190.

With Christian Kay, "Wreak, wrack, rack, and (w)ruin: The history of some confused spellings", Sounds, Words, Texts and Change, ed. Teresa Fanego, Belen Mendez-Naya & Elena Seoane, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2002, 129-143.

With Christian Kay, "Turning the dictionary inside out: Some issues in the compilation of a historical thesaurus", A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics, ed. Javier E. Diaz Vera, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2002.

Cerwyss O'Hare, MA, MPhil (Research Assistant)

• Currently working on classification of Existence and assisting with editorial work.

Tutor in first and second year classes

Transcriber of audio recordings for SCOTS project

Bass guitarist in a rock band.

Irene Elizabeth Reay, MA, PhD (Research Assistant)

• Currently working on classification of Mental Activity.

Part-time tutor and lecturer.

Author of "Sound Symbolism", in An Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, R. Asher & J.M.Y. Simpson, eds., Pergamon, Oxford, 1993, Vol. 8, 4064 - 4070.

Lesley A Haughton, MA (Research Assistant)

• Preliminary classification and editorial work.

Research Assistant, now married with two children and working part-time.

Flora Edmonds (Database Officer)

• Responsible for organising the input of data and for maintaining and developing the database, which is currently running in MySQL and PHP.
• Adapting software to special needs and designing databases.
• Maintaining and advising on project computing facilities (hardware and software).

Historical Thesaurus Web page editor.

Ian Blair Hamilton, HNC Mech. Eng.

Very keen golfer, stamp collector and postal historian.

Gerry McBride (IT Trainer)

• Responsible for production and delivery of SVQ Level II in Information Technology and general supervision of Adult Trainees entering data to the Historical Thesaurus database.