Beryl Atkins
Also known as Sue Atkins
Beryl Atkins was a lexicographer whose work connected corpus linguistics with practical dictionary making. Known professionally as Sue Atkins, she edited the Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary and worked with Charles Fillmore on FrameNet at Berkeley's ICSI. She served as EURALEX president, trained lexicographers in South Africa, and helped lead DANTE, a corpus-based lexical database for English. She received an honorary DLitt in 2000 and died in 2021.
Timeline
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1952
A French degree in Edinburgh
In Edinburgh, she graduates with first-class honours in French from Edinburgh University in 1952.
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1966–1974
Editing at Collins
Known professionally as Sue Atkins, she begins work at Collins in 1966 and becomes general editor of the Collins-Robert English-French Dictionary. With Tom McArthur, she compiles the first Dictionary of English Phrasal Verbs, published by Collins in 1974.
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1987
Building FrameNet
In 1987, she meets Charles Fillmore, whose Frame Semantics helps address her lexicographic questions. Their collaboration leads to FrameNet at ICSI, Berkeley, where she becomes the project's lexicographic adviser.
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1992–1994
President of EURALEX
From 1992 to 1994, she serves as EURALEX president while at Oxford University Press.
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1997–2000
Training lexicographers in South Africa
With Michael Rundell, she runs workshops for African lexicographers in South Africa in 1997 and 1998; they develop into the Lexicom series. In 2000, she receives an honorary DLitt from the University of Brighton.
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2008–2010
Developing the DANTE database
From 2008 to 2010, Sue Atkins, Adam Kilgarriff, Valerie Grundy and Michael Rundell lead the team that develops DANTE, a lexical database for English. Its corpus-derived descriptions of English words include meanings, grammar, collocations and text types, recorded in more than 40 machine-searchable data types.
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2021
Death at 90
She dies in September 2021 at age 90.
Career
- 1992–1994European Association for LexicographyPresident
- 1992–1994University of Oxford
- From 1987International Computer Science InstituteLexicographic Adviser
- 1966–1974CollinsGeneral Editor
Education
Most-cited works
- The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography
- Describing Polysemy: The Case of ‘Crawl’With Charles Fillmore
- Lexicographic Relevance: Selecting Information From Corpus Evidence
- Predictable meaning shift: Some linguistic properties of Lexical Implication Rules
- Bilingual Dictionaries: Past, Present and Future
Colleagues
Sources and credits
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