Jean Margaret Aitchison (born 3 July 1938) is a Professor Emerita of Language and Communication in the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Her main areas of interest include socio-historical linguistics; language and the mind; and language and the media.

Biography

Aitchison earned her MA from Cambridge, and an AM from Radcliffe College at Harvard. She was an assistant lecturer in Greek at Bedford College London from 1961 to 1965, lecturer and senior lecturer, and reader in linguistics at the London School of Economics from 1965 to 1992. She was the Rupert Murdoch Professor of language and communication at Oxford from 1993 to 2003, Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford from 1993 to 2003 (emeritus since 2003). In 1996 she gave the BBC Reith lectures on The Language Web. Professor Aitchison is a descendant of Sir Charles Umpherston Aitchison, lieutenant governor of the Punjab from 1882 to 1887 and founder of Aitchison College in Lahore, Pakistan.

Research

In Aitchison (1987), she identifies three stages that occur during a child's acquisition of vocabulary: labelling, packaging and network building. These stages are discussed in detail in surveys of theories of vocabulary acquisition such as Milton & Fitzpatrick (2014).

Key publications