I am a lexical semanticist, lexicologist, and lexicographer, which is to say that I'm interested in words: their meaning, and their representation in the mind and in dictionaries. I approach word meaning from a pragmatic viewpoint - in other words, I am interested in how our knowledge of the world affects our use of words.
My main areas of interest are relations among words (especially antonymy, or opposition, but also synonymy, hyponymy and other - onymies), gradable adjective meaning (especially size/measurement adjectives like big, small), social labelling (how we categorise people - black, white, gay, straight, disabled, Muslim?), and how to handle such words in dictionaries. I've also dabbled in non-derivational syntax, feminist approaches to language, and dictionaries for African languages.
Selected publications:
Semantic relations and the lexicon. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
For a sample chapter, click here
Reviews of Semantic relations and the Lexicon:
The Linguist List
Acta Lingvistica Hafniensia
Studies in Informatics and Control
Linguistics and conceptual information in Meaning-Text Theory: the case against some paradigmatic relations. Proceedings of MTT-2003, Paris 16-18 June 2003. University of Paris, 11-19.
Knowledge of words versus knowledge about words: the conceptual basis of
lexical relations. In Bert Peeters (ed.), The lexicon/encyclopedia
interface. (Current research in the semantics-pragmatics interface 5.)
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2000.
Defining people: race and ethnicity in South African English dictionaries.
International Journal of Lexicography (1998) 11:1.1-33.
The elusive bisexual: social categorization and lexico-semantic change. In
Kira Hall and Anna Livia (eds.), Queerly phrased: language, gender, and
sexuality. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Current projects:
Antonymy in childhood (with Steven Jones, University of Central Lancashire)
[working paper available at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/1-4-1.html]
A construction grammar approach to antonym canonicity.
Antonyms in early childhood pedagogical materials.
Measure phrases in Germanic languages: why semantic explanations aren't
enough.
Establishing antonym canonicity in English and Swedish (with UK-Sweden
Group on Comparative Lexicology).