Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2019
1. News
1.1 Memorial event for Randolph Quirk
On 9 July 2019 the Survey of English Usage, MyAV·¶, the British Academy and the Wolfson Foundation organised a memorial event to celebrate the life of the eminent linguist and scholar, Professor Lord Randolph Quirk CBE who died on 21 December 2017.
Randolph Quirk was born on 12 July 1920 on the Isle of Man. He studied at University College London, where he later became Quain Professor in English Language and Literature. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of London from 1981 to 1985.
Randolph Quirk became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1976 and was knighted in 1985. He was President of the British Academy from 1985 to 1989 and became a life peer as Baron Quirk of Bloomsbury on 12 July 1994.
Quirk is well-known for founding the Survey of English Usage at MyAV·¶ in 1959, but most of all for the monumental Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), which he co-authored with Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. This book, which became known as Quirk et al. is one of the great standard reference grammars of English.
The programme was as follows
14:00 | Ìę | Welcome and introduction: Bas Aarts |
14:15 | Dick Hudson: âThe educational background to Randolphâs achievementsâ | |
14:45 | Jenny Cheshire: âRandolph Quirk, relative pronouns, and sociolinguisticsâ | |
15:15 | Liliane Haegeman: âRegister-specific subject omission in written Englishâ | |
16:15 | David Denison: âRandolph Quirk and serial relationshipâ | |
16:45 | David Crystal: âMarginalia memorabiliaâ |
As can be seen by the tributes on this page, Randolph was well-respected and much-loved in equal measure. If you knew Randolph personally, were inspired by him you can add your tribute on this page.
1.2 The Oxford handbook of English grammar
Published just before Christmas 2019 (with a publication date of 2020), the Oxford handbook of English grammar, edited by Bas Aarts, Jill Bowie of the Survey of English Usage and Gergana Popova of Goldsmiths, University of London, this publication is an authoritative, critical survey of current research and knowledge in the grammar of the English language. The handbook contains 31 chapters.
Features:
- addresses foundational areas of research methodology;
- explores a range of theoretical approaches to English grammar;
- covers all the core subdomains of grammar, including morphology;
- examines the relationship between grammar and other areas of linguistics;
- explores grammatical variation across genres and dialects, and change over time.
The handbookâs wide-ranging coverage will appeal to researchers and students of English language and linguistics from undergraduate level upwards.
(OUP site)
1.3 Statistics in corpus linguistics research (to be published 2020)
Coming soon from Routledge, written by Sean Wallis of the Survey of English Usage, this book is written for linguistics researchers who use corpora. But any researcher in the social sciences who uses statistical methods will benefit from its approach. It focuses on the âBinomialâ statistics of choiceÌęâ where participants choose between options, or speakers express themselves with different alternative words or constructions.
The book teaches statistical thinking in an original and more intuitive way. Traditional textbooks focus on significance tests, which are difficult to understand and remember. This book uses confidence intervals insteadÌęâ an approach that is highly visual, allowing us to see uncertainty and significant differences on graphs immediately.
It contains a number of original statistical tests and methods. It explains how to compare the results of different experiments, how to use statistical reasoning to guide âdata cleaningâ, how to address problems of sampling from corpora, and how to apply corrections to statistical models. It is full of practical advice and methods for students and researchers of corpus linguistics.
1.4 Made at MyAV·¶ & BETT
The Survey took part in Made at MyAV·¶ event, a community event held throughout the College on 5 October 2019. Our âstoryâ can be found here.
We also took part in the annual Bett Education Show at Londonâs ExCeL with an Englicious stand. We were part of the team, MyAV·¶âs research accelerator programme for education technology (âEdTechâ).
1.5 MyAV·¶ Festival of Culture
Kathryn Allan was involved in two events in MyAV·¶âs Festival of Culture (June 2019): she interviewed Prof. Lynne Murphy (University of Sussex) at the event âWhatâs wrong with American English?â, and co-organised a session on âLanguages of London: Celebrating Languages and Multilingualism in the Cityâ, which featured a panel discussion involving linguists, anthropologists, geographers, educators, and multilingual speakers.
1.6 Englicious
On 20 March 2019 the Englicious website (www.englicious.org) was relaunched, with a completely new design adding new functionality and improved navigation.
Try Englicious - just click on the image above.
If you havenât yet heard of Englicious, hereâs some information about the site:
What is Englicious?
- an entirely free online library of original English language teaching resources, especially grammar.
- closely tailored to the linguistic content of 2014 National Curriculum for England
- relevant for students and teachers at Key Stages 1-5.
- includes grammar, punctuation and spelling test practice material.
- uses examples from natural language corpora.
Englicious will help students:
- learn about English grammar in a fun way, using interactive online resources, including exercises, projects and games, all of which can be projected onto an interactive whiteboard
- develop their literacy skills, with a focus on spelling, punctuation and writing
- stimulate their enjoyment of (using) language, both in spoken and written form
- enhance their confidence
- improve their test scores, especially the Year 2 and Year 6 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling tests in UK schools
Englicious offers teachers:
- year-by-year overview of the new programmes of study and attainment targets in the 2014 UK National Curriculum
- hundreds of fully prepared lesson plans, including everything from bite-sized starters to larger projects, for use in the classroom
- assessments for evaluating student attainment and progress
- a complete and rigorous overview of English grammar
- the entire 2014 National Curriculum Glossary, enhanced with new terminology enabling teachers to use terminology consistently throughout the Key Stages
- professional development materials for teachers to brush up on their own knowledge
The Englicious project now has over 10,000 registered users.
In 2019, we visited several schools to teach Continuous Professional Development (CPD) courses, and hosted courses at MyAV·¶, engaging with hundreds of teachers from primary schools through to post-16 level.
We published a book called How to teach grammar for school teachers with two parts: part I focuses on English grammar subject knowledge while part II focuses on the pedagogical principles we advocate for the teaching of grammar with many practical teaching ideas.
Dr Ian Cushing left the Englicious project to take up a lectureship at Brunel University, London. We are grateful for his excellent work on the project.
From 1 December 2019 Luke Pearce joined the Englicious team. Luke has extensive experience in teaching English in secondary and further education and has taught English as a foreign language (EFL) overseas and English for academic purposes (EAP) courses at universities. He has also taught GCSE English Language and Functional Skills in secondary schools and further education providers. He has a CELTA, PGCE and Masterâs in Education and Language from the University of Sheffield. For his dissertation, he conducted a critical discourse analysis into the role of regional varieties of English in the GCSE English Language specification.
1.7 English Grammar Day 2019
Jointly organised by the Survey of English Usage, the University of Oxford and the British Library, the fifth English Grammar Day took place on Monday, 8 July 2019 at the British Library in London. These events are aimed at members of the public, and especially teachers.
The programme was as follows:
10.15 â 10.45 Charlotte Brewer, Hertford College, University of
Oxford: âGrammar and gender: do dictionaries keep up?'
10.45 â 11.15 Jon Hutchinson, Reach Academy, Feltham: âMaking the
implicit, explicit; teaching all children the language of languageâ
11.45 â 12.15 David Denison, University of Manchester: âSo, letâs
talk about soâ
12.15 â 12.45 Ingrid TiekenâBoon van Ostade, Universiteit Leiden,
Netherlands: âNo complaint tradition in the Netherlands?â
14.00 â 14.30 Barbara Bleiman, English and Media Centre: âGrammar
and reading â necessities and opportunitiesâ
14.30 â 15.00 Rob Drummond, Manchester Metropolitan University:
âLanguage and identity: in defence of the non-standardâ
15.30 â 16.45 Any Questionsâstyle panel discussion
Chair: John Mullan, University College London
(BL site)
(Youtube)
The next English Grammar Day will take place on Monday 6 July 2020, again at the British Library. You will be able to book on the during the spring.
1.8 London-Lund Corpus 2
Bas Aarts took part in to celebrate the launch of LLCâ2, the second iteration of the London-Lund Corpus. was compiled as a collaborative project by MyAV·¶âs Survey of English Usage and Lund University in the 1980s.
The new LLCâ2 Corpus was compiled by Dr Nele PĂ”ldvere, Dr Victoria Johansson and Prof. Carita Paradis. Nele recorded the sample materials during several research visits at the Survey. LLCâ2 is described on its website as follows:
âLLCâ2 is a half-a-million-word corpus of spoken language with data recorded in 2014â2019 with adult educated speakers of British English. On the one hand, the corpus is a resource for studying contemporary speech from a synchronic perspective and across different registers and groups of speakers. On the other hand, it is designed according to the same principles as the original London-Lund Corpus with data from the 1950â1980s. To this end, it facilitates principled comparisons across different time periods of English with roughly 50 years in between. The corpus design includes: face-to-face conversation, mobile phone/Skype conversation (landline telephone calls in łąłą°äâ1), broadcast discussions and interviews, parliamentary language, spontaneous commentary, legal language and prepared speech.â
The LLCâ2 Corpus offers exciting new opportunities for the study of spoken English.
2. Research
For a full overview of research publications, presentations, etc. by members of the Survey, see Section 4.
2.1 Nuffield Grammar Project
With Professors Dominic Wyse and Bas Aarts as Principal Investigators, researchers at the MyAV·¶ Institute of Education (IOE) and at MyAV·¶âs Survey of English Usage were awarded a grant by the Nuffield Foundation to examine whether teachers using the Surveyâs Englicious website (www.englicious.org) to teach six- and seven-year-olds about grammar can help pupilsâ writing.
This project, which combines the expertise of scholars in two MyAV·¶ faculties, has now been underway for a year.
The manualisation of the Englicious intervention was completed. Ten lesson plans were written for delivery in schools. These were reviewed by a group of four year 2 teachers. The lesson plans were also peer-reviewed by the research team.
The training programme was delivered last autumn and in January to two cohorts of teachers.
The selection of project schools at random from the stratified list of all state primary schools in London has been completed, and this spring the team will be visiting the intervention and non-intervention schools.
It is hoped that the projectâs outcomes will have implications for the way that children are taught grammar during Key Stage 1 of the National Curriculum for England.
The team members are:
- Professor , MyAV·¶ Department of English Language and Literature
- Dr , MyAV·¶ Institute of Education
- Dr , Brunel University
- Professor , MyAV·¶ Institute of Education
- Dr , MyAV·¶ Institute of Education
- Dr , MyAV·¶ Institute of Education
- Professor , University of Durham
- Professor , MyAV·¶ Institute of Education
2.2 Keywords Project
Kathryn Allan edited a special issue of the journal Critical Quarterly (61:3), titled Keywords for Today: Reflections, Reactions, Futures. This includes a piece on the word environment, written jointly by Kathryn and Alan Durant.
2.3 ICECUP
ICECUP is our research platform designed for carrying out research with parsed corpora.
The very latest version of ICECUP is compatible with versions of Windows from XP to 10 and is fully 64-bit compatible. As a service to the Corpus Linguistics research community, the software is available as a from here. This means that if you have already got a licence for ICE-GB Release 2 or DCPSE you can upgrade to the latest version of the software from our website for free.
If you have never used ICECUP before and would like to try it out, you can download a sample corpus and get all the software and help files for free.
2.4 Blogs
The Survey has three blogs:
Bas Aartsâ
blog.
Sean Wallisâ
blog.
And the .
2.5 Survey seminars
Survey seminars are open to everyone, and are announced on our website (see Events).
The following research seminars took place during 2019.
- Wednesday 30 January, : âIntegrating Discourse and Materialityâ
- Wednesday 13 March, : âDeadjectival nominalizations in -ness: mind the gapsâ.
- Wednesday 13 November, : âSiegfried Sassoon and the Experience of Warâ.
- Thursday 6 December, ZsĂłfia DemjĂ©n: Metaphor and distress in lived-experience accounts of voices that others cannot hearâ.
3. Teaching
3.1 Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics
Our seventh Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics ran from Monday 1 July to Wednesday 3 July 2019. It attracted a large number of participants from all over the world, including a large contingent of students from Meiji University in Tokyo.
Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis taught a tailored version of the Summer School at The English Corpus Linguistics Symposium, University of Brescia on 19 June 2019.
The eighth annual Summer School will take place from 1-3 July 2020.
More information, including how to book
3.2 Continuous Professional Development
The Survey has offers Professional Development courses to teachers in primary and secondary schools who need to teach the requirements for grammar, punctuation and spelling in the National Curriculum for England.
The Survey also offers bespoke courses for teachers in schools (INSET courses). For more information, please email the Survey.
3.3 MA in English Linguistics
Most Survey colleagues teach on the MA program in English Linguistics (with pathways in âEnglish Corpus Linguisticsâ and âEnglish in Useâ) which attracts students from all over the world.
Our graduates have gone on to PhD scholarships in the UK and abroad, as well as careers in teaching, publishing, and public relations.
Prospectus and more information
4. Publications, conference presentations, talks, dissertations and other studies using Survey material
Please let us know if you would like us to include your publications based on SEU material. We would appreciate it if you send us offprints of any such publications.
Aarts, B., I. Cushing and R. Hudson (2019) How to teach grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aarts, B. (2019) âWhat for?â In: N. Yåñez-Bouza, E. Moore, L. van Bergen and W. B. Hollmann (eds.) Categories, constructions and change in English syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 54-80.
Aarts, B., S. Wallis and I. Cushing (2019) âExploiting parsed corpora in grammar teachingâ. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 18.5. 1-36. » .
Aarts, B. and I. Cushing (2019) âMaking grammar meaningful: grammatical subject knowledge and pedagogical principles for grammar teachingâ. Teaching English 19. 52-54.
Aarts, B. (2019) âTaxing taxonomy: how easy is it to categorise words?â Macmillan International Higher Education Blog. » .
Aarts, B. (2019) âTeaching English grammar: the Englicious approachâ. Languages, Society & Policy: Dialogues. » .
Aarts, B. (2019) Plenary lecture: âAuxiliary and lexical verbs in English: three approachesâ. Research in English Linguistics conference, Universities of Mainz and Frankfurt, Germany.
Aarts, B. (2019) âLinguistic analysis in schools: the Englicious approachâ. Presentation at the inauguration of LASER (Language Analysis in Schools: Education and Research). British Academy, London.
Aarts, B. (2019) âThe custom of speaking: how English has changedâ. Memorial Lecture for Professor Jan Rusiecki. University of Warsaw, Poland.
Aarts, B. (2019) âOblique predicative forâ. Lecture for the Philological Society. Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.
Aarts, B. (2019) âThe English Corpus Linguistics Symposiumâ. One day symposium taught with Sean Wallis at the University of Brescia, Italy.
Aarts, B. (2019) âHow to teach grammarâ. Presentation at the workshop on pedagogical linguistics, University of Leeds.
Aarts, B. (2019) âAttributive V-ing modifiers in Englishâ. Presentation at an event to honour Emeritus Professor Richard Hudson, British Academy, London.
Aarts, B. (2019) âResearch in spoken English: the London-Lund experienceâ. Paper presented at the international symposium Spoken Language across Time, Centre for Languages and Literature, University of Lund, Sweden.
Aarts, B. (2019) âGrammar in the classroom: the UK experienceâ, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden.
Aarts, B. (2019) âPredicative forâ, Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden.
Aarts, B. (2019) âAuxiliaries in English: dependent verbs or lexical verbs?â Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden.
Allan, K. (2019) (ed.) Keywords for today: reflections, reactions, futures. Special issue of the journal Critical Quarterly (61:3).
Allan, K. (2019) (ed.) âIntroductionâ. Critical Quarterly (61:3). 4-9.
Allan, K. and A. Durant (2019) âEnvironmentâ. Critical Quarterly 61:3. 67-84.
Cushing, I., B. Aarts and R. Hudson (2019) How to teach grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cushing, I., S. Wallis and B. Aarts (2019) âExploiting parsed corpora in grammar teachingâ Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 18.5. 1-36. » .
Dwyer, K., A. S. David, R. McCarthy, P. McKenna and E. Peters (2019). âLinguistic alignment and theory of mind impairments in schizophrenia patientsâ dialogic interactionsâ. Psychological Medicine, 1-9.
Dwyer, K. (2019) âImpoverished linguistic alignment in schizophrenia patientsâ dialogic interactionsâ. Exploring Language. Presentation at the workshop From Genes to Brains to Minds. Aston University.
Gries, S. Th. (2019) â15 years of collostructions: some long overdue additions/corrections (to/of actually all sorts of corpus-linguistics measures)â. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:3. 385â412.
De Felice, R. and E. Moreton (2019) âIdentifying speech acts in a corpus of historical migrant correspondenceâ, Studia Neophilologica 91:2. 154-174.
De Felice, R. and N. PoÌldvere (2019) âWhat you give is what you get: Advice-giving and uptake in conversationâ. Paper presented at the 40th ICAME conference, UniversitĂ© de NeuchĂątel, Switzerland.
Hoffmann, T., J. Horsch and T. Brunner (2019) âThe more data, the better: a usage-based account of the English comparative correlative constructionâ. Cognitive Linguistics 30.1.
Hudson, R., B. Aarts and I. Cushing (2019) How to teach grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hundt, M. (2019) âIt is important that mandatives (should) be studied across different World Englishes and from a Construction Grammar Perspectiveâ. In: P. NĂșñez-Pertejo, M. JosĂ© LĂłpez-Couso, B. MĂ©ndez-Naya and J. PĂ©rez-Guerra (eds.) Crossing linguistic boundaries. London: Bloomsbury. 211-238.
Jach, Daniel (2019) âPreposition placement in English as a second language: a usage-based Approachâ. PhD dissertation, Friedrich-Schiller-UniversitĂ€t Jena.
Mehl, S. (2019) âLight verb semantics in the International Corpus of English: onomasiological variation, identity evidence and degrees of lightnessâ. English Language and Linguistics 23.1. 55-80.
Murphy, M. L. and R. De Felice (2019) âRoutine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of ±è±ô±đČčČő±đâ, Journal of Politeness Research 15:1. 77-100.
RodriÌguez-AbrunÌeiras, P. (2019) ââSo we get to discuss what varieties of English are flourishing at the moment, so we have Philippine English, for exampleâ: On the use of exemplifying markers in Philippine Englishâ. Paper presented at the 40th ICAME conference, UniversitĂ© de NeuchĂątel, Switzerland.
RoÌthlisberger, M. (2019) âThe effect of register on syntactic alternations: An exploratory study of regional variation in the English dative alternation. Paper presented at the 40th ICAME conference, UniversitĂ© de NeuchĂątel, Switzerland.
Shakir, M. and D. Deuber (2019) âCompiling ICE add-on corpora for internet registers: opportunities, challenges, and solutionsâ. Paper presented at the 40th ICAME conference, UniversitĂ© de NeuchĂątel, Switzerland.
Van Driessche, L. (2019) âRetrieving prepositional arguments from ICEâ Laetitia. Paper presented at the 40th ICAME conference, UniversitĂ© de NeuchĂątel, Switzerland.
Wallis, S.A. 2019. âComparing ÏÂČ tables for separability of distribution and effect: meta-tests for comparing homogeneity and goodness of fit contingency test outcomesâ. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 26:4, 330-355.
Wallis, S.A. (2019). âInvestigating the additive probability of repeated language production decisionsâ. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 24:4, 490-521.
Wallis, S.A, I. Cushing and B. Aarts (2019). âExploiting parsed corpora in grammar teachingâ. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LiLT) 18:5. 1-36. » .
Wu, Zhen (2019). âEarly Mandarin loanwords in contemporary English: the influence of transcription systems on orthographyâ. English Today 36:1. 23-29.
Ziegeler, D. and C. Lenoble (2019). âThe stative progressive in Singapore English: a panchronic perspectiveâ. In: P. NĂșñez-Pertejo, M. JosĂ© LĂłpez-Couso, B. MĂ©ndez-Naya and J. PĂ©rez-Guerra (eds.) Crossing linguistic boundaries. London: Bloomsbury. 239-266.
Bas Aarts
Director
January 2020
This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by 7Survey Web Administrator.