Meaning and Changing Culture

Research on Meaning and changing culture focuses on the interplay between sociocultural change and language variation and change. Meaning is here defined in its broadest sense, including the ways in which meaning is contextually constructed and negotiated on a social level. Studies in this area draw on multidisciplinary methodologies, combining qualitative and quantitative linguistic analyses with methods used in social sciences, communications and cultural studies, anthropology, history and theology. The initial focus is on linguistic phenomena during two periods of cultural transition in the history of England. The first is the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England. Here, investigations focus on ideologically motivated lexical variation and change in ecclesiastical and theological core vocabulary. The second key period is the transition from Early Modern to Late Modern English; here, research on corpus-based historical sociopragmatics is carried out under the aegis of a project entitled Sociocultural Reality and Language Practices in Late Modern England. A third focus of interest within this framework is emerging from VARIENG research on the use of English in Finland.