Join us at Jacek Fisiak Memorial Lecture 2025 entitled “Shakespeare’s Language and the English Language”. This year our guest is going to be Prof. Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University).
Date: Tuesday 9/12/2025
Time: 18:30-19:30
Venue: zoom
Registration form [external link to a form on Microsoft Forms]
Abstract
This talk reflects on both Shakespeare’s language and the English language. Such reflection is timely, given the rise of corpus linguistics and indeed digital humanities, both of which have afforded new insights. This talk will draw on work undertaken as part of the AHRC-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project, a project that largely deploys corpus-based methods.
In the first part of this talk, I reflect on the role of Shakespeare’s language in shaping the study of the history of English, and in particular its profound effect on the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). For illustration, I consider how compound words have been treated.
In the second part, I turn to the perceived effects of Shakespeare’s language on the English language, that is to say, how the wider public have construed those effects. In particular, I dwell on the myth that Shakespeare created thousands of neologisms.
In the third and final part, I examine the actual linguistic patterns of Shakespeare’s language, focussing on affixes, words and grammar.
