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.
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News
Verb Phrase book published
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The
grammar of English is often thought to be stable over time. However
a new book, edited by Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and
Sean Wallis, The Verb Phrase in English: investigating recent language
change with corpora (Cambridge University Press, 2013) presents
a body of research from linguists that shows that using natural language
corpora one can find changes within a core element of grammar, the
Verb Phrase, over a span of decades rather than centuries.
The book draws from papers first presented at a symposium on the verb phrase organised for the Survey’s 50th anniversary and on research from the Changing English Verb Phrase project.
For more information, table of contents and sample articles see
here.
Grammar at your fingertips:
App for iOS and Android
We are proud to announce the release of the iGE App for the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android devices. The interactive Grammar of English is a complete course in Modern English Grammar. iGE updates our popular Internet Grammar, and presents it as a mobile application for a phone or tablet.
Click here for more information. The latest
iGE 1.1 release is published for Android and the latest Apple devices.
Our website is now 'mobile-friendly'. Hand-held users have the option
of a new 'mobile reader mode' alongside the standard desktop view.
Survey seminar series
Two seminars will take place in the Spring term.
On Wednesday 27 September, Professor Sylvia Adamson will speak on grammaticalisation and social stylistics in Foster Court 233. Professor Tania Kuteva will speak on the evolution of grammar on 13 March in Foster Court 220. All seminars start at 4:15pm.
Survey seminars are open to all members of staff and students, and are generously supported by the English Department.
For more information click here.
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The AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship Creating a Web-Based Platform for English Language Teaching and Learning started in 2010. This project involves building a website of interactive structured English language courses with a grammatical focus, tailored to the goals of the National Curriculum’s Key Stages 3-5. The course consists of lesson modules dynamically accessing the corpora based at the Survey.
Details of the project, which is carried out with the London
Borough of Camden as a partner, are available here.
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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.
This page last modified 25 April, 2013 by Survey Web Administrator.


