The Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2009
The Annual Report for 2009 incorporates the newsletters published during the year.
1. News
1.1 New research funding
Details of the project, which will be carried out with the London Borough of Camden as a partner, are available here. See also section 1.2 below.
1.2 New staff
We are very pleased to welcome two new members of staff.
Dr Jillian Bowie joins the Survey on The changing verb phrase in present-day English project. Jill has BA in Linguistics and an MA in Applied Linguistics, both from the University of Queensland. She worked for Rodney Huddleston as a research assistant on the Cambridge grammar of the English language. Her research interests include English syntax and morphology, language evolution (phylogenetic, historical, and ontogenetic), complexity in language, and the grammatical analysis of spoken discourse. Her PhD thesis was entitled âCompositional versus holistic theories of language evolution: an interdisciplinary and experimental evaluationâ.
Daniel Clayton is a secondary school English teacher who has joined us on the Creating a web-based platform for English language teaching and learning project. Among other activities, Dan has written course books for Nelson Thornes and was a team leader and trainer for the AQA Examinations Board. He has a blog on English grammar aimed at school teachers. He will work closely with Sean Wallis on the Knowledge Transfer Project.
In July 2009 the Survey celebrated its 50th birthday during a one-day symposium entitled Current change in the English verb phrase. The day was a great success, and were pleased that Randolph Quirk, the founder of the Survey, attended parts of the proceedings. We hope to publish an edited book with papers presented at the symposium. For details about the programme, see section 2.2.
The symposium preceded the Third International Conference on the Linguistics of English (ICLCE3), organised by the SEU and the Linguistics Department at Queen Mary, University of London. The ICLCE progarmme can be viewed .
1.4 Technical note: 64 bit Windows
We have had a number of enquiries about running ICECUP for 64 bit versions of Windows. A number of new PCs are now running 64 bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7. Due to a decision by Microsoft, the ICECUP codebase is one of a large number of programs that are blocked by âWin64â. ICECUP will run on a 32 bit version of Windows running on a 64 bit PC, so one solution is to âdual-bootâ the PC. We do intend to address this problem in the future, but if you have any success on running ICECUP on a 64 bit Windows PC, do let us know.
1.5 For UCL staff and students: ICE-GB and DCPSE are now on the managed system
Both the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) are now available for registered users on the UCL student and staff managed computer system.
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2. Research projects
2.1 Proof of Concept funding from UCL
Work has been ongoing on a project entitled A proof of concept for developing a web-based English language teaching and learning platform funded by UCL, supported by UCL Business. The strategic aim of this Proof of Concept (PoC) is to make the Surveyâs resources available much more widely and to initiate a route to market. In order to do this we will create an English Language Teaching and Learning Platform based on the existing corpora housed at the SEU. The plan is to source example sentences used in classroom settings dynamically from a corpus database on a web server, rather than use static, hard-coded and invented examples. The platform would be specifically designed for teachers and students at secondary schools.
The Proof of Concept project concentrates on developing a viable technology. Our new AHRC project, Creating a web-based platform for English language teaching and learning (see section 1.1 above) aims to take this technology and apply it to the UK National Curriculum. Sean Wallis has been working on the server-side technology, which is based on our ICECUP database, and experimenting with a number of different ways for examples to be extracted from the corpus and presented.
This Proof of Concept process has also allowed us to look at a number of practical pedagogical issues regarding how we choose to present examples to students. These then raise further questions of appropriate technology.
With a dynamic web-based corpus teaching platform it is very easy to generate a large number of examples to illustrate a point or to provide refresher exercises. Control over the selection process is therefore extremely important. The following were dynamically extracted from ICE-GB and presented as an exercise to a student who is asked to identify nouns in each example.
- Dear John, [W1B-007 #36]
- In order for him to proceed to the third round what will he
have to achieve in the second bearing in mind heâs obviously
not going to win it. [S2B-009 #87]
- Coming up to three laps to go now in this five thousand metres.
[S2A-007 #79]
- In the order in which they occur here right. [S1B-017
#84]
- And will the Chancellor confirm that the underlying rate of inflation will remain high throughout next year that inflation minus mortgage interest relief will be high throughout next year? [S1B-052 #21]
One can attest to the apparent âauthenticityâ and sheer number of examples. Students can be left in little doubt that nouns are commonplace and they may discern how to recognise them â by sheer repetition if by no other means.
However, automatically generated examples are of varying length and âreadabilityâ by default. The second example is grammatically complex, but lexically simple, whereas example 5 contains adult political jargon and would score highly on a âsmogâ score for a large number of tri-syllables. Finally, from the point of view of the task set, some examples contain compound nouns such as âmortgage interest reliefâ which may cause particular problems.
Secondly, the generation of feedback to the student requires some thought. Since we cannot handcraft examples we must be able to automatically provide feedback relevant to each particular example and the answers given.
The project is developing a demonstration system which will allow teachers to obtain course material for their own lessons or students to carry out self-study in grammar. This system will be shown to school teachers and students as well as potential commercial partners.
2.2 The changing verb phrase in present-day British English
As noted above the Survey organised a one-day symposium both to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of the Survey and as part of the project The changing verb phrase in present-day British English. The programme of the symposium included the following speakers:
- Bas Aarts, Jo Close and Sean Wallis âChoices over time: methodological issues in current changeâ
- Christopher Williams: âChanges in the verb phrase in legal Englishâ
- Alexander Bergs and Meike Pfaff âI was just reading this article: Is the present perfect of recent past on its way out?â
- Manfred Krug âRecent change and grammaticalization in constructions marking intentionâ
- Magnus Levin âProgressives changing in timeâ
- Stig Johansson âModals and semi-modals of obligation in American English: some aspects of developments from 1990 until the present dayâ
- JosĂ© RamĂłn Varela PĂ©rez âNegative and operator contraction with present tense be: a study of change in progress in Spoken British Englishâ
- Marcus Callies âThe spread of bare infinitival complements in present-day Englishâ
- David Denison âA new class of verbs taking that-clause complementsâ
- Geoffrey Leech and Nicholas Smith âVerb constructions over fifty+ years of written Englishâ
The talks were followed by a panel discussion on the topic of change in English chaired by Geoffrey Leech. The participants were: David Crystal, David Denison, Manfred Krug, and Sali Tagliamonte.
The day ended with a keynote lecture on the history of the Survey delivered by David Crystal entitled âSurviving Surveyingâ.
Dr Jo Close has left the Survey and has taken up a teaching post at the University of Leeds. She will still be working closely with Bas Aarts, Sean Wallis and Geoffrey Leech on an edited book of papers based on papers presented at the symposium.
We have made a new appointment on this project. See section 1.2 above.
3. Publications, conference presentations, talks, theses and other studies using Survey material
Please let us know if you would like us to include your publications based on SEU material. We will appreciate it if you send us offprints of any such publications.
Aarts, Bas (2009) âCategorial and functional fusions in Englishâ. Plenary lecture at the Symposium on linguistic categorization and the nature of linguistic categories. April 2009, University of TromsĂž, Norway.
Aarts, Bas (2009) âTracking changes in the use of the English progressive with DCPSEâ. Research seminar, School of English, University of Liverpool.
Aarts, Bas (2009) âResearching the English language, past and present, with parsed corporaâ. Research seminar, School of Language, Literature and Communication, University of Brighton.
Aarts, Bas (2009) (with Jo Close) âThe subjunctive in spoken British Englishâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Aarts, Bas (2009) (With Jo Close and Sean Wallis.) âChoices over time: methodological issues in current changeâ. Paper presented at the symposium Current Change in the English Verb Phrase, part of the Third International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3). July 2009, London.
Aarts, Bas (2009) (With Joanne Close and Sean Wallis) âUsing the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate changes in the English verb phraseâ. Presentation on current change at a workshop entitled Corpus-based advances in historical linguistics organised by the Philological Society. University of York.
Aarts, Bas (2009) âInvestigating current change in Englishâ. Plenary lecture at the conference English Language and Literature Studies: Image, Identity and Reality. December 2009, University of Belgrade, Serbia.
Aijmer, Karin (2009) âWell as a hesitation marker in learner languageâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Biermeier, Thomas (2009) âWord-formation in new Englishesâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 331-349.
Biewer, Carolin âPassive constructions in Fiji English: a corpus-based studyâ. In: Jucker, Schreier and Hundt (2009) (eds.). 361-377.
Bogaert, Julie van (2009) âA reassessment of the syntactic classification of pragmatic expressions: the positions of you know and I think with special attention to you know as a marker of metalinguistic awarenessâ. In: Renouf and Kehoe (2009) (eds.). 131-154.
Close, Joanne (2009) (with Bas Aarts) âThe subjunctive in spoken British Englishâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Close, Joanne (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis) âChoices over time: methodological issues in current changeâ. Paper presented at the symposium Current Change in the English Verb Phrase, part of the Third International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), London, 2009.
Close, Joanne (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis) âUsing the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate changes in the English verb phraseâ. Presentation on current change at a workshop entitled Corpus-based advances in historical linguistics organised by the Philological Society. University of York.
Collins, Peter (2009) Modals and quasi-modals in English. Language and Computers: Studies in Practical Linguistics 67. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Collins, Peter (2009) âModals and quasi-modalsâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 73-88.
Collins, Peter (2009) âThe progressivesâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 115-124.
Collins, Peter (2009) âInformation-packaging constructionsâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 295-316.
Collins, Peter (2009) âInformation-packing constructions in contemporary English: regional and stylistic variationâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Columbus, Georgie (2009) âA corpus-based analysis of invariant tags in five varieties of Englishâ. In: Renouf and Kehoe (2009) (eds.). 401-414.
DehĂ©, Nicole (2009) âClausal parentheticals, intonational phrasing, and prosodic theoryâ. Journal of Linguistics 45. 569-615.
Deuber, Dagmar (2009) âStandard English in the secondary school in Trinidad: problemsÌę- propertiesÌę- prospectsâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 83-104.
Diaconu, Gabriela (2009) âThe expression of obligation and necessity in the New Englishesâ. Poster presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Divjak, Dagmar and Stefan Th. Gries, (2009) âCorpus-based cognitive semantics: a contrastive study of phasal verbs in Russian and Englishâ. In Katarzyna Dziwirek and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (eds.). 273-296.
Dziwirek, Katarzyna and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2009) (eds.). Studies in cognitive corpus linguistics. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Gesuato, Sara (2009) âEncoding of goal-directed motion vs resultative aspect in the COME + infinitive constructionâ. In: Renouf and Kehoe (2009) (eds.). 382-400.
Gesuato, Sara (2009) âSemantic patterns of "HAVE been to": corpus data and elicited dataâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Gries, Stefan Th. and Stefanie Wulff (2009) âPsycholinguistic and corpus-linguistic evidence for L2 constructionsâ. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics 7. 163-186.
Hoffmann, Thomas and Lucia Siebers (2009) (eds.) World Englishes - problems, properties and prospects. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hundt, Marianne (2009) âGlobal English - global corpora: a report on a panel discussion at the 28th ICAME conferenceâ. In: Renouf and Kehoe (2009) (eds.). 451-462.
Hundt, Marianne (2009) âConcord with collective nouns in Australian and New-Zealand Englishâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 207-224.
Hundt, Marianne (2009) âGobal feature - local norms? A case study on the progressive passiveâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 287-308.
Jucker, Andreas H, Daniel Schreier and Marianne Hundt (2009) (eds.) Corpora: pragmatics and discourse. Papers from the 29th Conference on English Language Research on Computerized Corpora (ICAME 29). Language and Computers. Studies in Practical Linguistics 68. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Kaltenböck, Gunther (2009) âIs that a filler? On complementizer use in spoken object clausesâ. Views 18.1, 28-63.
Kaltenböck, Gunther and Barbara Mehlmauer-Larcher (2009) âComputer corpora: a useful tool for English language teaching?â Views 18.3. 71-74.
Leech Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair and Nicholas Smith (2009) Change in Contemporary English: a grammatical study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kirk, John M. and Jeffrey L. Kallen (2009) âNegation in Irish standard Englishâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Kortmann, Bernd and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (2009) âWorld Englishes between simplification and complexificationâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 265-285.
LĂŒdeling, Anke and Merja Kytö (2009) (eds.), Corpus linguistics: an international handbook, Vol. 2. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Mair, Christian (2009) âCorpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics: the role of corpus evidence in the study of sociolinguistic variationâ. In: Renouf and Kehoe (2009) (eds.). 7-32.
Mair, Christian (2009) âInfinitival and gerundial complementsâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 263-276.
Mair, Christian (2009) âSpecificational clefts in Late Modern English: corpus-based studies of diachronic trends mostly in real timeâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Mair, Christian (2009) âCorpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics. Studying educated spoken usage in Jamaica on the basis of the International Corpus of Englishâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 39-60.
Meyer, Charles F. Introducing English Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mukherjee, Joybrato and Stefan Th. Gries (2009) âVerb construction associations in the International Corpus of Englishâ. English World-Wide 30.1. 27-51.
Mukherjee, Joybrato and Stefan Th. Gries (2009) âLexical gravity across varieties of English: an ICE-based study of speech and writing in Asian Englishesâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Mukherjee, Joybrato and Janina Warner (2009) Highly polysemous verbs in New Englishes: a corpus-based pilot study of Sri Lankan and Indian English. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
MĂŒller, Frederike (2009) âCurrent changes in modals of obligation - a multivariate analysisâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Olmen, DaniĂ«l van (2009) âA contrastive look at English and Dutch (negative) imperativesâ. In: Jucker, Schreier and Hundt (2009) (eds.). 407-421.
Otani, Naoki and Stefan Th. Gries (2009) âBehavioral profiles: a corpus-based perspective on synonymy and antonymy. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
OzĂłn, Gabriel (2009) Alternating ditransitives in English: a corpus-based study. PhD thesis, University College London.
Peters, Pam (2009) âIrregular verbs: regularization and ongoing variabilityâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 13-30.
Peters, Pam (2009) âThe mandative subjunctive in spoken Englishâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 125-138.
Peters, Pam (2009) âAustralian English as a regional epicenterâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 107-124.
Peters, Pam, Peter Collins and Adam Smith (2009) (eds.) Comparative Studies in Australian and New Zealand English: Grammar and Beyond. Varieties of English Around the World G39. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Peters, Pam and Yasmin Funk (2009) âNo in the lexicogrammar of Englishâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 225-241.
Renouf, Antoinette and Andrew Kehoe (2009)(eds.) Corpus linguistics: refinements and reassessments. Language and Computers. Studies in Practical Linguistics 69. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Rooy, Bertus van (2009) âThe shaded core of the perfect across Englishesâ. In: Hoffmann and Siebers (2009) (eds.). 309-330.
Smith, Adam (2009) âLight verbs in Australian, New Zealand and British Englishâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 139-155.
Smith, Adam (2009) âNon-numerical quantifiersâ. In: Peters, Collins and Smith (eds.). 159-181.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol and Stefan Th. Gries (2009) âCorpora and grammarâ. In Anke LĂŒdeling and Merja Kytö (eds.). 933-951.
Suoniemi, Paula (2009) âThe progressive in World English varieties: a corpus-based study. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Wallis, Sean (2009) âGrammatical Noriegas: modelling case interaction in corpora and treebanksâ. Paper presented at the 30th ICAME conference, Lancaster.
Wallis, Sean (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Jo Close) âChoices over time: methodological issues in current changeâ. Paper presented at the symposium Current Change in the English Verb Phrase, part of the Third International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (ICLCE3), London, 2009.
Wallis, Sean (2009) (With Bas Aarts and Joanne Close) âUsing the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English to investigate changes in the English verb phraseâ. Presentation on current change at a workshop entitled Corpus-based advances in historical linguistics organised by the Philological Society. University of York.
Wallis, Sean (2009) âDelivering the vision of the Concordatâ. Invited plenary lecture at the Vitae Researcher Development conference, Warwick, 9 September 2009.
Bas Aarts
Director
March 2010
This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by Survey Web Administrator.