Dr Andrew Wilson
Senior Lecturer
Degree: MA (Cambridge), MA, PhD (Lancaster)
Associated research centres and groups: University Centre for Computer Corpus Research on Language (UCREL)
Current Teaching
LING 132 - Introduction to Media Discourse
LING 211 - The Language of Advertising
LING 233 - Researching Media
LING 301 - Linguistic Methodology (lecture on statistics)
LING 401 - Research Issues in Applied Linguistics (statistics workshops)
LING 511 - Corpus Linguistics (distance version)
LING 541 - Introduction to Quantitative Data and Analysis for Applied Linguistics
Research Interests
My main research interest is in computer-assisted content analysis and its applications in the study of individual and group behaviour, culture, and society. My current work focusses on applying this methodologyto the psychoanalysis of religiousexperience and sexual fetishism. I am also interested in non-verbal semiotics, especially the construction of cultural meanings in the domain of fashion and footwear. I have a strong interest in applying mathematical modelling to my areas of interest.
The Psychoanalysis of Religious and Mystical Experience
My recent book (Psychosemiotic Cycles and the Liturgical Year, 2008) sketches the outline of a psychosemiotic framework for studying "aesthetic-religious experiences", both within and beyond the Christian liturgy. Rejecting a simple dichotomy between religious/spiritual/mystical experiences (on the one hand) and aesthetic experiences (on the other), itargues that they are essentially one and the same, and that any distinction between them consists in their contextualization (or "discernment") in relation to a body of doctrine - hence the unitary term "aesthetic-religious experience".The book proposes that such experiences are, in fact, altered states of consciousness, induced by deeply concentrated narrowed attention on a personally meaningful stimulus (or "symbol") which is perceived as particularly beautiful and pleasurable. Building on this foundation, the book goes on to focus especially on the relationship between aesthetic-religious experiences themselves and conventionalized patterns of narrating them. By means of a detailed case study of the cycle of seasonal prayers in a version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the book shows how Martindale's methodology of "narrative pattern analysis" - a combination of computer-assisted content analysis and statistical methods for the analysis of time-series data - can be used to explore hypotheses about the psychodynamic relationships between liturgical texts, liturgical and natural time, and the wider Christian tradition of narrating mystical experience. The book's theoretical foundations represent a practical synthesis of ancient and modern thought, and draw on psychological, semiotic, and aesthetic concepts taken from the (neo-)Thomistic and Franciscan scholastic traditions, the writings of the Canadian Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan, and modern psychoanalysis, psychology, and linguistics.
A notable feature of altered states of consciousness (such as hypnosis, meditation, drug-induced states, and mystical religious experiences) is a change in the certainty of body boundaries - i.e., how strongly we perceive the borders of our own selves in relation to other people and the outside world. The strength of someone's body boundary image has typically been measured by counting references to the conceptual fields of "boundary" and "boundary penetration/destruction" in responses to ink-blot tests. However, it has been suggested that this scoring system can also usefully be applied to other, naturally occurring texts such as stories and biographical narratives. For this purpose, I have developed a computerized content analysis dictionary - the Body Type Dictionary - to measure the two categories of boundary imagery in English-language texts. Thus far, the dictionary has been applied to a corpus of fetish narratives and to the entire text of the Bible.
The Lexicographical Treatment of the Latin Vulgate Bible
In my Ph.D. thesis, I developed a so-called conceptual glossary to the Latin Vulgate translation of the Gospel according to John. A conceptual glossary, simply defined, is a lexicographic reference work in which words within a given text or text-corpus are classified according to their membership of a set of semantic fields. However, unlike a simple thesaurus, a conceptual glossary contains exhaustive and fully disambiguated references to the locations of words in the text under examination, rather than giving just one or two illustrative citations for each meaning. The primary theoretical motivation for the work was to take a first small step along the road to a quantitative empirical semantics of later, and especially biblical, Latin. However, the conceptual glossary has a number of other potential uses in areas such as text-linguistics and discourse analysis, translation studies, and the study of intertextuality.
My Ph.D. workdeveloped into a longer-term commitment to the linguistic, and especially semantic, analysis of biblical Latin, and has subsequently attracted external funding in the form of a British Academy Small Research Grant as well as fairly substantial internal funding (£8000) from the University's Research Committee. The analyzed material is being disseminated in book form by the major publisher of reference works on classical languages, Olms-Weidmann.
The most recent phase of this work, supported by the University's Research Committee, aimed to develop a web-based interface to semantically analysed Vulgate material, the latter initially comprising the four gospels.
The Linguistic Construction of Cultural Meanings - "The Language of Shoes"
In the context of an ongoing research project, known for convenience as "The Language of Shoes", I am attempting to approach the cultural system of footwear fashions from the twin orientations of onomasiology and cultural studies - in other words, I want to find out which terms languages use for footwear styles and what associative meanings these words and objects have within a culture. I see this work as an extension of the Wörter-und-Sachen paradigm pioneered in the early twentieth century, which married onomasiology, etymology, and cultural studies - "from the trivial to the sublime" (Hüllen 1990: 141) - within a strongly object-oriented linguistics. However, my work gives much more emphasis than did the original Wörter-und-Sachen scholars to value judgements and to the constructivist nature of culture.
Potential Doctoral Proposals
I am especially interested in receiving proposals in the following areas:
- Language and religion/spirituality
- Language and psychoanalysis
- Language and personality
- The linguistics of altered states of consciousness
- The discourse of fashion (including non-verbal aspects)
Publications list
A fuller list of my publications can be found here.
Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database
Andrew Wilson has 11 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk
Wilson, Andrew (2008) Psychosemiotic Cycles and the Liturgical Year: A Case Study and Framework for Research. Cuvillier Verlag, Göttingen. ISBN 9783867276696
Wilson, Andrew (2009) Vulgata (Altes Testament). In: Lexikon der Bibelhermeneutik. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-11-019277-3
Wilson, Andrew (2009) Barrier and penetration imagery in altered states of consciousness discourse : replicating the five-stage model of Christian mysticism in the Bible. In: Cognitive Approaches to Language and Linguistic Data : Studies in Honor of Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk. Polish Studies in English Language and Literature (27). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 357-372. ISBN 978-3-631-58861-1
Wilson, Andrew (2009) The well-formedness of two psychoanalytic word categories in Portuguese texts. In: Metody analizu teksta. Methods of text analysis. Chernivtsi State University, Chernivtsi, pp. 285-307. ISBN 978-966-423-043-5
Wilson, Andrew (2009) Vocabulary richness and thematic concentration in internet fetish fantasies and literary short stories. Glottotheory, 2 (2). pp. 97-107. ISSN 1337 - 7892
Wilson, Andrew (2010) Disinhibition and narrative in the paraphilias. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, 34 (2). p. 431. ISSN 0278-5846
Wilson, Andrew (2011) The regressive imagery dictionary : a test of its concurrent validity in English, German, Latin, and Portuguese. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 26 (1). pp. 125-135. ISSN 0268-1145
Wilson, Andrew (2011) Boots, indecency, and secular sacred spaces : implicit religious motives underlying an aspect of airline dress codes. Implicit Religion, 14 (2). pp. 173-192. ISSN ISSN (printed): 1463-9955. ISSN (electronic): 1743-1697
Associated Keywords: Aesthetics, Altered states of consciousness, Automatic content analysis, Bible, Biblical languages, Body image, Computer-assisted analysis of Latin and Greek texts, Computing in the Humanities, Digital humanities, Ecclesiastical Latin, Emotions, Fashion, Fetishism, Footwear, Humanities computing, Lexicology, Medieval Latin, Mysticism, Neoscholasticism, Neoscholastic psychology, Non-verbal communication, Onomasiology, Personality, Psychoanalytic thought, Psychology, Quantitative linguistics, Religion, Semiotics, Spirituality, Systems theory, Theology, Unconscious mind, Vulgate
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