The Survey of English Usage carries out research in English Linguistics and was the first centre in Europe to carry out research using text corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at UCL. More...

News

Two Postdoctoral Research Fellowship positions at the Survey of English Usage

New Project: Teaching English Grammar in Schools

We are very pleased to announce that the Survey has been awarded an AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship. The project, entitled Creating a Web-Based Platform for English Language Teaching and Learning, will start in 2010, aims to build a website supporting interactive structured English language courses, tailored to the goals of the National Curriculum’s Key Stages 3-5. The course will consist of lesson modules dynamically accessing the corpora based at the Survey.

Details of the project, which will be carried out with the London Borough of Camden as a partner, are available here.

50 years of the Survey of English Usage 1959-2009

On the 14 July a one-day symposium took place to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage. The theme of this symposium was on Current Change in the English Verb Phrase and David Crystal was the plenary speaker at this event.

Survey seminar series

The following Survey seminars will take place this term.

On Wednesday 28 October Professor Tania Kuteva will speak on the interaction between culture and linguistics in relation to politeness and other examples of persuasive language. On 25 November, Dr Deyvani Sharma will give a talk on dialect change in generations of a London Punjabi community. Survey seminars are open to all members of staff and students and are generously supported by the English Department.

For more information click here.

ICECUP IV beta release

New: Download β version of ICECUP IV

We are very pleased to announce that the beta release of ICECUP IV, the new research platform for experimental research in parsed corpora, is available for download from our website. ICECUP IV is compatible with ICE-GB Release 2 and DCPSE.

• Users possessing a full CD copy of ICE-GB Release 2 or DCPSE can download the software entirely free of charge to carry out research on their corpus.
• Anyone can download the two 20,000-word sample corpora with ICECUP IV.

This is a beta version. ICECUP IV was developed under the ESRC Next Generation Tools research project.

Current research

The Changing Verb Phrase in Present-Day British English

funded by


For more information on the project, click here.

Next generation tools for linguistic research in grammatical treebanks

funded by

This project aims to provide the necessary grammatical tools to enable linguists to robustly evaluate the grammar of naturally occurring speech and writing. The benefits include:

• Firmly establishing sound experimental standards in linguistic methodology.
• Make complex experiments in linguistics viable and readily reproducible (a paradigm shift analogous to the impact of the development of an efficient and usable grammatical query system).

For more information on the project, click here. The project has now been completed, and we are continuing to carry out research in this area.

Parsed Corpora of English

Two major parsed corpora of British English are available to order from the Survey of English Usage.

The Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) consists of 87,000 trees and 800,000 words of spoken English across the decades. Release 2 of the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) is an upgrade of the popular 1 million-word ICE-GB corpus. Both corpora are released with the new ICECUP 3.1 software.

More information, free sample downloads and order forms are here.

Full contact information

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This page last modified 11 November, 2009 by Survey Web Administrator.