Telephone: 020 7911 5000 ext 2365
Email: l.sylvester1@wmin.ac.uk
Postal: University of Westminster, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies,
32-38 Wells Street,
London, W1T 3UW
Section: English Language

Louise Sylvester is Reader in English Language. She was educated at the University of Leeds (BA Hons English Language and Literature) and King’s College, London (MA Literature and Language Before 1525; PhD Historical Semantics). She was AHRB/HEFCE Research Fellow at King’s College, London and has taught at the University of Manchester and the University of Central England in Birmingham.

She is Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded five-year project, ‘The Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain c.700-1450: Origins, Identification, Contexts and Change' with Professor Gale Owen-Crocker, University of Manchester.

She is Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme-funded three-year project 'The Vocabulary of Medieval Dress and Textiles in Unpublished Sources'.

Her research has focused on historical semantics and lexicology and on language and gender.

Research and Publications

Books

Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

Teaching Chaucer (ed. with Gail Ashton). London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Professor Jane A Roberts (ed. with Christian Kay). Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001

Middle English Word Studies: A Word and Author Index (with Jane Roberts). Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2000

Studies in the Lexical Field of Expectation (Costerus New Series) Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994

Articles and Chapters

‘The Roles of Reader Construal and Lexicographic Authority in the Interpretation of Middle English Texts’ in Historical Cognitive Linguistics ed. Margaret Winters, Heli Tissari & Kathryn Allen. The Hague: Mouton, 2010, 197-222

‘Lexicological Confusion and Medieval Clothing Culture: Redressing Medieval Dress with the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Britain Project’ (with Mark Chambers) in Everyday Objects: Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture ed. Tara Hamling & Catherine Richardson. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, 71-82

‘From apareil to warderobe: Some Observations on Anglo-French in the Middle English Lexis of Cloth and Clothing’ (with Mark Chambers) in The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts ed. Richard Ingham. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010, 63-73

‘Romance,’ ‘Dream Vision,’ ‘Sir Amadace,’ ‘Sir Cleges,’ ‘Sir Degaré,’ ‘Sir Launfal,’ ‘Sir Tristrem’ in Companion to Pre-1600 British Poetry ed. Michelle M Sauer. New York: Facts on File, 2008

‘Teaching the Language of Chaucer’ in Teaching Chaucer ed. Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 81-95

‘Forces of Change: are Social and Moral Attitudes Legible in this Historical Thesaurus Classification?’ in The Power of Words: Essays in Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics. In Honour of Christian J Kay ed. Graham D. Caie, Carole Hough, and Irene Wotherspoon. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2007, 185-208

‘Categories and Taxonomies: A Cognitive Approach to Lexicographical Resources’ in Categorization in the History of English, ed. Christian Kay and Jeremy Smith. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004, 237-264

‘Evidence for Diachronic Semantic Change in the Historical Thesaurus of English: A Cognitive Linguistic Approach’ in New Trends in English Historical Linguistics: An Atlantic View, ed. Isabel Moskowich-Spiegel Fandino and Begoña Crespo Garcia, Universidade da Coruña, 2004, 189-221

‘Word Studies on Early English: Contexts for a Thesaurus of Middle English’ (with Jane Roberts) in A Changing World of Words: Studies in English Historical Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics, ed. Javier E Díaz Vera. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002, 136–159

‘One Thesaurus Leads to Another: TOE, HTE, TME’ (with Christian Kay and Irené Wotherspoon) in Lexis and Texts in Early English: Studies Presented to Jane Roberts, ed. Kay and Sylvester. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001, 73–186

‘Naming and Avoiding Naming Objects of Terror: A Case Study’ in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Päivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (Topics in Linguistics). Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000, 277–291‘Towards a Middle English

Thesaurus: Some Exploratory Approaches’ in Essays on Anglo-Saxon and Related Themes in Memory of Lynne Grundy, ed. Jane Roberts and Janet Nelson. London: King’s College London Medieval Studies, 2000, 557–569

‘The Vocabulary of Consent: Classification and Use’ in Lexicology and Semantics in English Historical Linguistics: Selected Papers from the 4th G. L. Brook Symposium, Manchester August 1998, ed. Julie Coleman and Christian Kay. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000, 157–178

‘Reading Narratives of Rape: The Story of Lucretia in Chaucer, Gower and Christine de Pizan,’ Leeds Studies in English 31, 2000, 115–144

‘Reading Rape in Medieval Literature’ in Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies, ed. David Metzger (Studies in Medievalism X). Cambridge: D S Brewer, 2000, 120–135

‘“The Misterys of his Art”: A Moment of Ambiguity in Clare’s “Autobiography”,’ John Clare Society Journal 17, 1998, 35–40

‘A Thesaurus of Middle English’ (with Jane Roberts) in Dictionaries of Medieval Germanic Languages: A Survey of Current Lexicographical Projects, ed. K H van Dalen-Oskam, K A C Depuydt, W J J Pijnenburg and T H Schoonheim. Turnhout: Brepols, 1997, 41–45

‘Procedures in Classifying Middle English Vocabulary: Some Preliminary Observations’, in Middle

English Miscellany: From Vocabulary to Linguistic Variation, ed. Jacek Fisiak. Poznan: Motivex, 1996, 123–133

‘Middle English Word Studies’ (with Jane Roberts), Medieval English Studies Newsletter 34, 1996, 8–11

‘Scarecrows in the Oxford English Dictionary,’ English Today 11, 1995, 25–27

‘Women, Men and Words: Lexical Choices in Two Fairy Tales of the 1920s’ in Feminist Linguistics in Literary Criticism, ed. Katie Wales (Essays and Studies 47). Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1994, 51–64

‘What Amounteth Al This Wit?: The Aims of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron,’ New Comparison 11, 1991, 137–157

Some Recent Papers

‘The Medieval Dress and Textile Vocabulary in Unpublished Sources Project: some preliminary results’ (with Mark Chambers), 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Pecs, 2010)

‘Mining for gold: Investigating Multilingualism in the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing’, 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, 2010)

‘The Medieval Dress and Textile Vocabulary in Unpublished Sources Project’ (with Mark Chambers), Writing England: Books 1000-1400 (Leicester, 2010)

‘Multilingualism and Lexical Hierarchies’, 15th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Munich, 2008)

Introduction to the Lexis of Cloth and Clothing project, International Society of Anglo-Saxonists (London, July/August 2007)

‘Linguistic Constructions of Heterosexuality’, Fourth International Conference of the Gender and Language Association (Valencia, 2006)

‘The Authority of the Historical Dictionary and Individual Construal of Meaning’, Directions in English Language Studies (Manchester, 2006)

‘The Middle English Dictionary and the Reader of Chaucer: A Cognitive View’, panel on The Implications of the Completion of the Middle English Dictionary for the Study of Chaucer’s Language, New Chaucer Society Congress (Glasgow, 2004)

‘Investigating the Valence of the Passive Male in Heterosexual Romance’, Discovering the ‘Other’: 800–1600 (Leicester, 2004)

‘Some Thoughts on Taste and the Cognitive Salience of Hierarchies’, Swiss Romande troisième cycle (Lausanne, 2004)

‘Fictions of Desire: How Can We Historicize What Psychoanalysis Has Shown Us?’, panel on Desire, Thirty-Eighth Annual International Congress on Medieval Studies (Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, 2003)

‘Hierarchies in Dictionaries and in the Mind’, International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology (Leicester, 2002)