Dr Lynne Murphy

Biography

I hold a B.A. in Linguistics and Philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and an A.M. (master of arts) and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

After leaving Illinois, I held academic posts at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and Baylor University (Texas), before moving to England and the University of Sussex in January 2000.

In my spare time I write a blog on the differences between American and British Englishes, Separated by a Common Language.

Role

I am Reader in Linguistics and Convenor of Postgraduate Research Degrees in the School of English. My job incorporates research, teaching and administration.

Please note that I work a flexitime schedule.  During Spring 2013 I am on campus Mon, Wed and Fri.

My research mainly concerns lexicology, lexical semantics and pragmatics, and lexicography --studying phenomena related to word meaning and how word meanings are learnt and stored in the mind. This often involves using corpus linguistic methodologies. My 'pet' phenomena are gradable adjective meaning, antonymy/contrast (and other semantic relations among words),  the names for social identity groups (i.e. racial/ethnic groups, sexual orientation identities, religious/political identities), and British/American English differences

Current projects include:

• Looking at how non-lexicographers think and talk about dictionaries and finding synonyms.
• Investigating the role of adult linguistic input on children's understandings of size adjectives.
• Frameworks for contrast: contextual support for novel lexical relations (with Steven Jones & Anu Koskela)
  

Recent projects have included:

• A textbook on lexical semantics for Cambridge University Press.
• A jointly-authored reference book on semantics terminology for Continuum.
• A jointly authored book on Antonymy in English (in production at Cambridge UP)

• Comparison of the discourse functions of antonym pairs in Swedish and English.
• Investigating antonym use in children's discourse and child-directed discourse.
• A construction grammar account of the representation of antonym pairs in the mental lexicon.
• A construction-based diachronic/cross-linguistic (Germanic) investigation of measure phrase + adjective constructions, like three feet tall, ?30 decibels loud, and #3 kilos heavy.
• Ascertaining methodologies and definitions for determining 'canonical' or 'direct' antonym relations between words.

Planned projects include:

• A book for a popular audience on the relationships, interactions and attitudes relating to British and American English.

For more information on semantic relation-related projects, visit the page of my research group.

I'm very interested in receiving doctoral proposals in semantics, pragmatics and lexicology.  Current and recent doctoral students are studying/have studied:

      Motion events in Tunisian Arabic and TA>English interlanguage: pedagogical implications   
      Modality in French>English interlanguage.
      Pragmatics of metaphor and irony.
      Antonymy in Arabic

I would be particularly interested in receiving proposals that relate to my own research interests.

I teach modules in semantics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and research skills. I am particularly interested in incorporating academic and transferable skills into the department's curricula, and in English language and linguistics more generally.

I am a member of the Linguistics Specialist Advisory Group for the national Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies.

Autumn 2012 modules:

Approaches to Meaning (level 1, with Justyna Robinson)

Approaches to Meaning in English (level 1)

Child Language Acquisition (level 2)

Intercultural Communication (level 3)

Research Proposal (level 3)

Spring 2013 modules:

Investigating Language in Context (level 1, with Justyna Robinson)

Research Dissertation (level 3)

First Language Acquisiton (MA)

Student Consultation

Spring 2013

Mondays 12-1

Wednesdays 10-10.50

Jones, Steven, Murphy, M Lynne, Paradis, Carita and Willners, Caroline (2012) Antonyms in English: Construals, Constructions, and Canonicity. Studies in English Language . Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521761796

Murphy, Lynne and Piazza, Roberta (2011) Linguistic Semantics and Historical Semantics. In: Asymmetrical concepts after Reinhart Koselleck: historical semantics and beyond. Transcript Verlag.

Murphy, Lynne and Koskela, Anu (2010) Key Terms in Semantics. Continuum. ISBN 9781847062772

Murphy, M Lynne (2010) Lexical meaning. Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics . Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521677646

Murphy, Lynne and Jones, Steven (2008) Antonyms in children's and child-directed speech. First Language, 28 (4). pp. 403-430. ISSN 0142-7237

Jones, Steven, Paradis, Carita, Murphy, Lynne and Willners, Caroline (2007) Googling for 'opposites': a web-based study of antonym canonicity. Corpora, 2 (2). pp. 129-155. ISSN 1749-5032

Murphy, M Lynne (2006) Antonym as lexical constructions: or, why paradigmatic construction is not an oxymoron. Constructions, SV1 (8). pp. 1-37. ISSN 1860-2010

Murphy, Lynne (2003) Semantic relations and the lexicon: Antonymy, synonymy and other paradigms. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. ISBN 9780521780674