I am a lexicographer, onomastician, and corpus linguist, currently based at the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol) and the University of Wolverhampton. From 1990 to 2000 I was chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press. In the 1980s I was project manager of the first edition of the Cobuild dictionary and chief editor of Collins English dictionaries.
My current research interests are:
a) personal names: origin and history of family names; convention and creativity in name giving;
b) lexical analysis: mapping meaning onto use and corpus-based syntagmatic analysis of lexical regularities;
c) analysis of intentional lexical irregularities i.e. creative and innovative use of language;
d) similes and metaphors.
With colleagues based at UWE, I am currently compiling an AHRC-funded database of all the family names in the UK, with information about their linguistic and social origins, history, and geographical distribution.
Quite separately, I have developed a procedure called Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA), which is the foundation of The Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/cpa; work in progress). The basic principle is to discover how exactly meanings arise from patterns of usage (words in context), rather than treating words as isolable building blocks in a compositional strucutre. Associated with this is a theory of meaning in language called The Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), to be published by MIT Press in 2013.
Contact email:patrick.w.hanks@gmail.com
My current research interests are:
a) personal names: origin and history of family names; convention and creativity in name giving;
b) lexical analysis: mapping meaning onto use and corpus-based syntagmatic analysis of lexical regularities;
c) analysis of intentional lexical irregularities i.e. creative and innovative use of language;
d) similes and metaphors.
With colleagues based at UWE, I am currently compiling an AHRC-funded database of all the family names in the UK, with information about their linguistic and social origins, history, and geographical distribution.
Quite separately, I have developed a procedure called Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA), which is the foundation of The Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (http://nlp.fi.muni.cz/projects/cpa; work in progress). The basic principle is to discover how exactly meanings arise from patterns of usage (words in context), rather than treating words as isolable building blocks in a compositional strucutre. Associated with this is a theory of meaning in language called The Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), to be published by MIT Press in 2013.
Contact email:patrick.w.hanks@gmail.com
