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

Language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

and

Communication Communication is commonly defined as the transmission of information. Its precise definition is disputed and there are disagreements about whether Intention, unintentional or failed transmissions are included and whether communication not onl ...

in the Faculty of

English Language English is a West Germanic language that developed in early medieval England and has since become a English as a lingua franca, global lingua franca. The namesake of the language is the Angles (tribe), Angles, one of the Germanic peoples th ...

and

Literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...

at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

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 on The Language Web. Professor Aitchison is a descendant of Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, lieutenant governor of the Punjab 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 Hypernymy and hyponymy are the semantic relations between a generic term (''hypernym'') and a more specific term (''hyponym''). The hypernym is also called a ''supertype'', ''umbrella term'', or ''blanket term''. The hyponym names a subtype of ...

s and

hyponym Hypernymy and hyponymy are the wikt:Wiktionary:Semantic relations, semantic relations between a generic term (''hypernym'') and a more specific term (''hyponym''). The hypernym is also called a ''supertype'', ''umbrella term'', or ''blanket term ...

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 corporation, multinational publisher. It was founded in 1836 by George Routledge, and specialises in providing academic books, academic journals, journals and online resources in the fields of the humanit ...

. *''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 was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

, 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 British women linguists English non-fiction writers People educated at Wimbledon High School 1938 births Radcliffe College alumni