Words and Their Stories: An Etymological Exploration of the English Vocabulary

Description

This Project aims at investigating a set of words from the English lexicon according to the perspective of Etymology. The history of those words will be reconstructed, including their historical phonetics and phonology, morphology, and semantics. The focus will be on different semantic fields, to provide a qualitative / intensive lexicological analysis which can cover several conceptual areas of the English language. The investigation will be conducted, for example, on lexical items like "butterfly", "black", and "pandemic", and on some English 'proper words', like "boy" and "girl", which, despite appearing extremely simple and common, exist only in English and have not an actual etymological explanation. Words with uncertain etymology and origins will also be object of investigation. In particular, the lexical item "recorder", whose etymology is still puzzling scholars, will be the subject of a specific analysis involving the comprehensive exploration of literary and documentary sources. The Project, therefore, will associate traditional etymological and philological methodologies with an experimental comparative method aimed at shedding light on historically interesting and/or 'problematic' lexical items. Their possible reconstruction and the development of an innovative methodology will represent the intrinsic value of the Project itself. SURF Code: SURF-2023-0119

Period	19 Jun 2023 → 28 Aug 2023
Examinee	Shiyue WU, Jiameng (Evelyn) XIA, Jingkai DONG, Yiyang Huang, Yuzhi (Cecilia) Chen & Haotian LUO
Examination held at	Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
Degree of Recognition	National