Name Jean Aitchison | ||
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Books Words in the Mind: An Introd, The Articulate Mammal, Teach Yourself Linguistics, The seeds of speech, The Language Web: The | ||
History of Linguistics
Jean Aitchison (born Jean Margaret Aitchison, 3 July 1938) is a Professor of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include: Socio-historical linguistics; Language and mind; and Language and the media.
Contents
Biography
Aitchison earned her MA from Cambridge, and an AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. She was an assistant lecturer in Greek at Bedford Coll egeLondon from 1961-65, lecturer and senior lecturer, and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics from 1965-92. She was the Rupert Murdoch Professor of language and communication at Oxford from 1993-2003, Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford from 1993-2003 (emeritus since 2003). In 1996 she gave the BBC Reith lectures, The Language Web.
Research
In 1987, she identified three stages that occur during a child's acquisition of vocabulary: labelling, packaging and network building.
- Labelling: First stage and involves making the link between the sounds of particular words and the objects to which they refer, e.g., understanding that “mummy” refers to the child’s mother.
- Packaging: Entails understanding a word’s range of meaning.
- Network Building: Involves grasping the connections between words: understanding that some words are opposite in meaning. E.g., understanding the relationship between hypernyms and hyponyms.