Olivia King
Doctoral Student in Linguistics - Olivia's thesis is entitled Conceptualisations of SADNESS in Early Medieval England: A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of the Old English Sadness Lexicon.
Research project title
‘Conceptualisations of SADNESS in Early Medieval England: A Cognitive Semantic Analysis of the Old English Sadness Lexicon'
Supervisors:
Dr Adam Mearns + Dr Aditi Nafde
Contact Details:
Email: O.King3@newcastle.ac.uk
A brief outline of my research project
This project will be the first comprehensive study of Old English (OE) sadness vocabulary, making contributions to our knowledge of OE lexical semantics, the history of emotions and early medieval psychologies. This is a corpus-based study with a cognitive semantics framework, using a detailed analysis of the semantic field and its constituent words to define the meaning and use of sadness
vocabulary and explore its relationship with other emotions (e.g. fear, anger, joy) and cultural ideals. This will produce fundamental knowledge on OE conceptualisations of sadness and redefine our understanding of this theme in OE language, literature and culture.