Lexicology is a discipline that deals with the words of a language - but what is a word? For various reasons, the word "word" is hard to define.

In this course we will treat English words and phrases from a variety of perspectives, including
- historical linguistics (a brief overview of the diachronic development of the English lexicon)
- computational / corpus linguistics (the study of words and phrases through the analysis of electronic text corpora)
- the interfaces between lexicology and other areas of linguistics (e.g. lexical semantics, derivational morphology,...)
- variation studies (the social or regional distribution of words and phrases)
- translation studies (how are idioms dealt with in translations?).

Students are expected to work on their own empirical projects.