Jean Margaret Aitchison (born 3 July 1938) is a Professor Emerita of

Language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

and

Communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inqui ...

in the Faculty of

English Language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

and

Literature Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...

at the

University of Oxford , mottoeng = The Lord is my light , established = , endowment = £6.1 billion (including colleges) (2019) , budget = £2.145 billion (2019–20) , chancellor ...

and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include socio-historical linguistics; language and the mind; and language and the media.

Biography

Aitchison earned her MA from Cambridge, and an AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. She was an assistant lecturer in Greek at Bedford College London from 1961 to 1965, lecturer and senior lecturer, and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics from 1965 to 1992. She was the Rupert Murdoch Professor of language and communication at Oxford from 1993 to 2003, Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford from 1993 to 2003 (emeritus since 2003). In 1996 she gave the BBC

Reith lectures The Reith Lectures is a series of annual BBC radio lectures given by leading figures of the day. They are commissioned by the BBC and broadcast on Radio 4 and the World Service. The lectures were inaugurated in 1948 to mark the historic contribu ...

on The Language Web. Professor Aitchison is a descendant of Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, lieutenant governor of the

Punjab Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising a ...

from 1882 to 1887 and founder of Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan.

Research

In Aitchison (1987), she identifies 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

hypernym In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy () is a semantic relation between a hyponym denoting a subtype and a hypernym or hyperonym (sometimes called umbrella term or blanket term) denoting a supertype. In other ...

s and

hyponym In linguistics, semantics, general semantics, and ontologies, hyponymy () is a semantic relation between a hyponym denoting a subtype and a hypernym or hyperonym (sometimes called umbrella term or blanket term) denoting a supertype. In other ...

s. These stages are discussed in detail in surveys of theories of vocabulary acquisition such as Milton & Fitzpatrick (2014).

Key publications

*''New Media Language'' (edited with Diana M. Lewis). London and New York:

Routledge Routledge () is a British multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanities, behavioural science, education, law ...

. *''Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon''. 3rd edition (1st edition 1987). Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 2003. *'' Language Change: Progress or Decay?'' 4th edition (1st edition 1981). Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012. *''The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics''. 4th edition (1st edition 1976). London and New York: Routledge, 1998.EC Stewart, 1982, Book review-The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Helmut Esau. Hornbeam Press (1980), ''Language Sciences'', p. 360. *''The Language Web: The Power and Problem of Words''. 1996 BBC Reith lectures. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne:

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press is the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it is the oldest university press in the world. It is also the King's Printer. Cambridge University Pre ...

, 1997. *''The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution''. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Also, with new extended introduction, in C.U.P. Canto series, 2000.)

References

External links

Jean Aitchison homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aitchison, Jean Living people Fellows of Worcester College, Oxford Linguists from England Women linguists English non-fiction writers People educated at Wimbledon High School 1938 births Radcliffe College alumni