Richard Ashdowne

I oversee the linguistics course for Modern Languages and Linguistics (MLL) students at Trinity. The first-year linguistics course involves introductions to several broad subject areas and I give classes and tutorials for most of these (morphology, syntax, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, foundations of linguistic theory) to accompany the lectures provided by the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics; the remainder (phonetics and phonology) is taught through faculty lectures and classes. In the second and final years of the MLL course I teach the compulsory core paper in General Linguistics. I also give tutorials for the Historical Linguistics, and History and Structure of French papers for MLL and other students at Trinity and other colleges who have chosen these options. I also teach for three other colleges in linguistics or classical languages.

I am interested in all aspects of how languages work and change. The focus of my research has been on Latin and the Romance languages, and I have particular interests in lexical semantics (the meanings of words) and pragmatics (the use of language in context).

Earlier in my career I spent six years as a lexicographer of British medieval Latin. I have written about the process of lexicography in various publications and I am on the advisory board for the Anglo-Norman Dictionary project. I still retain a strong interest in the use of the Latin language in the medieval period in Britain and its relationship to the other languages of the British Isles, most recently investigating how medieval Latin texts may preserve the oldest or even only evidence for items of English vocabulary.

‘-mannus makyth man(n)? Latin as an indirect source for English lexical history’ in L. Wright (ed.), The Multilingual Origins of Standard English (De Gruyter: Berlin/Boston, 2020), 411-441

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (rev. ed.), ed. R. K. Ashdowne, D. R. Howlett & R. E. Latham (British Academy/OUP: London, 2018)

Latin in Medieval Britain, ed. R. Ashdowne & C. White (British Academy/OUP: London, 2017) [The introduction is available as a free download here]

Word of Mouth (2017) (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08lh6r1)

‘Address Systems’ in A. Ledgeway & M. Maiden (eds.), The Oxford Guide to the Romance Languages (OUP: Oxford, 2016), 897-906

‘Dictionaries of Dead Languages’ in P. Durkin (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography (OUP: Oxford, 2015), 350-66

Richard Ashdowne & James Morwood, Writing Latin (Duckworth/Bristol Classical Press, 2007)