The study of Shakespeare's language has not made full use of the digital resources found in electronic databases and corpora and their methodologies, methods that infuse the making of today's dictionaries, grammars, and much of historical linguistics. The Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare's Language project embraces these methods. This presentation will be a whistle-stop tour of some of the results flowing from the project along with associated methodological issues. It will discuss Shakespeare's neologisms; word-meanings and collocations; the idiolects of characters; and the language patterns of plays. Time permitting, we will also discuss a spin-off study on the language of emotion.

Jonathan Culpeper is Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University in Lancashire, England. He is the author of The Palgrave Handbook of Linguistic (Im)politeness (2017) and the co-editor, with Mireille Ravassat, of Stylistics and Shakespeare: Transdisciplinary Approaches (2011). In 2016 he began the Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare's Language project, a £1 million project funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project aims to bring corpus methods to the study of Shakespeare's language, providing a systematic description of his words and language patterns, and showing how they compare with those of his contemporaries.

Reception to follow.