Patrick Wyndham Hanks (24 March 1940 – 1 February 2024) was an English lexicographer, corpus linguist, and onomastician. He edited dictionaries of general language, as well as dictionaries of personal names.
Hanks was educated at Ardingly College, University College, Oxford (BA, MA), and Masaryk University (PhD). After graduation from Oxford, he started his lexicographic career as editor of the Hamlyn Encyclopedic World Dictionary [1] (1971). In 1970, he was appointed editor of Collins English Dictionary (1979). From 1980 to 1983, he was director of the Names Research Unit of the University of Essex, England, where he began a PhD under the supervision of Yorick Wilks.
In 1983, he was appointed managing editor of COBUILD, and in 1987 he took on the additional role of chief editor of English dictionaries for Collins (now HarperCollins). In the summer of 1988 and 1989, he was a visiting scientist at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, where he co-authored with Ken Church influential papers [2] [3] on corpus-based statistical methods in lexical analysis.
From 1990 to 2000, Hanks served as chief editor of current English dictionaries at Oxford University Press (OUP). In 1991 to 1992, he was joint principal investigator (with Mary-Claire van Leunen) of the HECTOR project at the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in Palo Alto, CA. The HECTOR project was a collaboration between OUP and DEC, and although its results were never published, they served as a basis for the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998), while the lexicographers working on it were also guinea-pig users in the development of one of the earliest search engines (AltaVista). On the basis of the COBUILD and HECTOR research in corpus analysis, Hanks began to develop his theory of Norms and Exploitations. From 2001 to 2005, he was adjunct professor of computational lexicography at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA, where he worked closely with James Pustejovsky. In 2003, he was appointed consultant and visiting scientist to the Collocations Project and Electronic Dictionary of the German Language (DWDS) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (BBAW) headed by Christiane Fellbaum. He has also served as a consultant on lexicographical methodology to the Institute of the Czech Language in Prague, to Patakis Publishers in Athens, and others.
Patrick Hanks was the author of many papers on lexical analysis, lexicography, onomastics, [6] and similes and metaphor. He is editor in chief of the Dictionary of American Family Names [7] (3 volumes, OUP 2003), and is co-author with Flavia Hodges and Kate Hardcastle of the Oxford Dictionary of First Names [8] (1990, 2006). He was section editor for lexicography in the second edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (ELL2; 2005), edited by Keith Brown, for which he commissioned survey articles on lexicography in all the world's major languages and on major issues in lexicography and lexicology. He edited a multivolume collection covering all aspects of lexicology for Routledge, and, with Rachel Giora, a companion collection covering all aspects of metaphor and figurative language.
From 2005 to 2009 he was a senior research associate at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, where he developed the empirical procedure of Corpus Pattern Analysis, [9] which links word meaning to patterns of word use and systematically distinguishes patterns of normal usage from creative uses. After a year in Prague at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Charles University, Prague, he returned to England as lead researcher on the FaNUK project in the Bristol Centre for Linguistics in the University of the West of England (UWE, Bristol), researching the origins, history, and geographical distribution of family names in the UK.
Hanks was latterly Professor in Lexicography at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) in the University of Wolverhampton, where he worked on projects in Corpus Pattern Analysis.
Lexicography is the study of lexicons, and is divided into two separate academic disciplines. It is the art of compiling dictionaries.
Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguists to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts, otherwise harder to quantify.
Dirk Geeraerts is a Belgian linguist. He is professor emeritus of theoretical linguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the founder of the research unit Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL). His main research interests involve the overlapping fields of lexical semantics, lexicology, and lexicography, with a theoretical focus on cognitive semantics. His involvement with cognitive linguistics dates from the 1980s, when in his PhD thesis he was one of the first in Europe to explore the possibilities of a prototype-theoretical model of categorization. As the founder of the journal Cognitive Linguistics and as the editor of the Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, he played an instrumental role in the international expansion of cognitive linguistics. Geeraerts is one of the outspoken advocates of the implementation of empirical methodologies, such as corpus linguistics in cognitive linguistic research. He also argues for the involvement of more pragmatic elements such as contextual factors, lectal variation, and language history that influence the construal of word meanings and the choice of lexical items for concepts.
In linguistics, phraseology is the study of set or fixed expressions, such as idioms, phrasal verbs, and other types of multi-word lexical units, in which the component parts of the expression take on a meaning more specific than, or otherwise not predictable from, the sum of their meanings when used independently. For example, ‘Dutch auction’ is composed of the words Dutch ‘of or pertaining to the Netherlands’ and auction ‘a public sale in which goods are sold to the highest bidder’, but its meaning is not ‘a sale in the Netherlands where goods are sold to the highest bidder’; instead, the phrase has a conventionalized meaning referring to any auction where, instead of rising, the prices fall.
John McHardy Sinclair was a Professor of Modern English Language at Birmingham University from 1965 to 2000. He pioneered work in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, lexicography, and language teaching.
The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) is an online Scots–English dictionary, now run by Dictionaries of the Scots Language, formerly known as Scottish Language Dictionaries, a registered SCIO charity. Freely available via the Internet, the work comprises the two major dictionaries of the Scots language:
Beryl T. "Sue" Atkins was a British lexicographer, specialising in computational lexicography, who pioneered the creation of bilingual dictionaries from corpus data.
Data-driven learning (DDL) is an approach to foreign language learning. Whereas most language learning is guided by teachers and textbooks, data-driven learning treats language as data and students as researchers undertaking guided discovery tasks. Underpinning this pedagogical approach is the data - information - knowledge paradigm. It is informed by a pattern-based approach to grammar and vocabulary, and a lexicogrammatical approach to language in general. Thus the basic task in DDL is to identify patterns at all levels of language. From their findings, foreign language students can see how an aspect of language is typically used, which in turn informs how they can use it in their own speaking and writing. Learning how to frame language questions and use the resources to obtain data and interpret it is fundamental to learner autonomy. When students arrive at their own conclusions through such procedures, they use their higher order thinking skills and are creating knowledge.
Computational lexicology is a branch of computational linguistics, which is concerned with the use of computers in the study of lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by some scholars as the use of computers in the study of machine-readable dictionaries. It is distinguished from computational lexicography, which more properly would be the use of computers in the construction of dictionaries, though some researchers have used computational lexicography as synonymous.
Reinhard Rudolf Karl Hartmann is an Austrian and English lexicographer and applied linguist. Until the 1970s, lexicographers worked in relative isolation, and Hartmann is credited with making a major contribution to lexicography and fostering interdisciplinary consultation between reference specialists.
Contrastive linguistics is a practice-oriented linguistic approach that seeks to describe the differences and similarities between a pair of languages.
Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners, also known as MEDAL, is an advanced learner's dictionary first published in 2002 by Macmillan Education. It shares most of the features of this type of dictionary: it provides definitions in simple language, using a controlled defining vocabulary; most words have example sentences to illustrate how they are typically used; and information is given about how words combine grammatically or in collocations. MEDAL also introduced a number of innovations. These include:
Aleš Klégr is a Czech linguist, professor of English language at Charles University in Prague. He specializes, among others, in lexicology, lexicography, semantics and morphology.
Sketch Engine is a corpus manager and text analysis software developed by Lexical Computing CZ s.r.o. since 2003. Its purpose is to enable people studying language behaviour to search large text collections according to complex and linguistically motivated queries. Sketch Engine gained its name after one of the key features, word sketches: one-page, automatic, corpus-derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour. Currently, it supports and provides corpora in 90+ languages.
Susan Elizabeth Hunston is a British linguist. She received her PhD in English under the supervision of Michael Hoey at the University of Birmingham in 1989. She does research in the areas of corpus linguistics and applied linguistics. She is one of the primary developers of the Pattern Grammar model of linguistic analysis, which is a way of describing the syntactic environments of individual words, based on studying their occurrences in large sets of authentic examples, i.e. language corpora. The Pattern Grammar model was developed as part of the COBUILD project, where Hunston worked for several years as a senior grammarian for the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary.
SkELL is a free corpus-based web tool that allows language learners and teachers find authentic sentences for specific target words. For any word or a phrase, SkELL displays a concordance that lists example sentences drawn from a special text corpus crawled from the World Wide Web, which has been cleaned of spam and includes only high-quality texts covering everyday, standard, formal, and professional language. There are versions of SkELL for English, Russian, German, Italian, Czech and Estonian.
Christian Janet Kay was Emeritus Professor of English Language and Honorary Professorial Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She was an editor, with her mentor Michael Samuels, of the world's largest and first historical thesaurus, the Historical Thesaurus of English, first published in 2009 as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED), a project to which she dedicated 40 years.
María Paz Battaner Arias is a Spanish philologist and lexicographer. Since 29 January 2017 member of Spanish Royal Academy. She was elected on December 3, 2015, to fill the chair s, vacant since the death in 2013 of José Luis Pinillos Díaz. She has directed and published several dictionaries and carried out numerous works on the didactics of the language. Her main lines of research are lexicology and lexicography, 19th century political language, specialised language and the didactics of the Spanish language.
Éva Buchi is a Swiss linguist and lexicographer specializing in the Romance languages.