Prof. Manfred Markus (University of Innsbruck): How to use EDD Online: a practical introduction

Professor Manfred Markus (University of Innsbruck) is a specialist in English historical and corpus linguistics, with research and teaching interests also in Dialectology, Varieties of English and Middle English Literature. He was chairholder for English Linguistics and Medieval English Literature at the University of Innsbruck from 1981 to 2009, Director of the Innsbruck project that created the English Dialect Dictionary Online, and Visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Trento, the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, the University of Dresden and the University of Turku. His numerous publications include Mittelenglisches Studienbuch (Tübingen 1990) and Middle and Modern English Corpus Linguistics: A Multi-dimensional Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamins 2012; co-edited with Yoko Iyeiri, Reinhard Heuberger and Emil Chamson).

How to use EDD Online: a practical introduction

In line with the complexity of the entries in Joseph Wright’s EDD, the electronic version of this imposing dialect dictionary, published 1898-1905, has been equipped with an accordingly complex interface. As the director of the Innsbruck project that has created EDD Online, I will familiarise the participants of this class with the main query routines, not only in terms of area retrieval (where did which word occur?), but also in terms of quantification and the characterisation of English traditional dialects by its typical features. The lecture will, thus, shed light on a new type of dialectology.