Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2015
1. News
1.1
Englicious
The Englicious project has received generous support from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL which has enabled us to employ a part-time colleague on the project. Dr Ellen Smith joined us from Newcastle University in Australia to help enlarge the site and develop its functionality. She is also involved with our new Professional Development course entitled ‘English Grammar for Teachers’, designed for those who feel they need to brush up on their English grammar subject knowledge. See below for further details.
In case you haven’t heard of Englicious, it is a web resource designed as a practical teaching and learning platform for primary and secondary schools with an emphasis on the grammar of English.
You can sign up for free at www.englicious.org.
Englicious contains a wide variety of innovative and interactive teaching materials. These include classroom lessons on English grammar, activities focusing on how written and spoken language differ, projects on the different uses of English in diverse settings, tutorials on how to analyse texts from a range of genres, as well as an expanding library of videos. There are also many interactive exercises for students. Englicious uses authentic examples sourced from UCL’s English language corpora. In addition the site features a detailed and informative grammar glossary and CPD materials for teachers. Englicious has been tested in schools, and has now been released to the teaching community. To date almost 2,000 teachers have signed up to use the site.
You may be interested in watching a series of videos on English grammar that the project has produced. They are available on the Englicious YouTube Channel.
You can also follow Englicious on Twitter
and Facebook.
1.2 Continuous Professional Development
As noted above, the Survey has begun offering Professional Development courses on the National Curriculum Grammar requirements for teachers in UK primary and secondary schools. Full details...
We also offer ‘Inset Teaching’ where we provide training to teachers in schools. For more information, email the Survey.
1.3 English Grammar Day 2015
Together with the University of Oxford and Jonnie Robinson of the British Library (BL), the Survey organised the second English Grammar Day on Monday 29 June 2015 at the British Library. Speakers included Jenny Cheshire, Dan Clayton, Jonnie Robinson, Amanda Redfearn, Charlotte Brewer and Harry Ritchie. There was a panel discussion at the end of the day, led by John Mullan. See the BL website (archived here) and the programme (PDF).
This year’s English Grammar Day will be held on 27 June 2016 at the British Library. Speakers for 2016 are author, broadcaster, and Professor of Children’s Literature Michael Rosen; language specialists Bas Aarts, Ellen Smith, Debbie Cameron and Simon Horobin; secondary school teacher Ian Cushing and the British Library’s dialect curator Jonnie Robinson. Public participation is encouraged in a Panel chaired by English Professor John Mullan. The programme will appear in due course on the BL’s Events page.
2. Research
2.1 ICECUP 3.1.1
We
are pleased to report that the latest release of our parsed corpus
exploration software (ICECUP 3.1.1), written by Sean
Wallis, is available for download from our website. In 2016
we plan a full formal release and relaunch of both ICE-GB
(Release 2) and DCPSE corpora.
Sean reports that this is a robust release. We have been using the
new version on our UCL network systems for teaching since the start
of the Autumn term. The latest package contains a completely reworked
help file which is integrated with the software.
This release is compatible with versions of Windows from XP to 10 and is fully 64-bit compatible. It contains a number of additional enhancements over ICECUP 3.1 which are documented on our website and in the help file.
As a service to the Corpus Linguistics research community, the software is available as a download 'release candidate' from here. This means that if you have already got a licence for ICE-GB R2 or DCPSE you can upgrade to the latest version of the software from our website for free.
2.2 Blogs
Bas Aarts has begun a new blog on English grammar aimed at teachers in UK primary and secondary schools. It is called GRAMMARIANISM and is linked to the Englicious website.
Sean Wallis continues to publish articles, discussion pieces and teaching material on the subject of statistics for corpus linguistics at corp.ling.stats.
2.3 Research publications and presentations
For an overview of research publications, presentations, etc. by members of the Survey, see section 4.
3. Summer School, seminars and other events
3.1 Summer School
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The Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics was held for the third time from Monday 6 July – 8 July 2015. This year’s Summer School will take place from 6-8 July 2016.
For more information, including curriculum, timetable and how to
book, see here.
3.2 Survey Seminars
The following seminars took place during 2015:
- 26 January, Gabriel Ozón, University of Sheffield. ‘Rethinking the light verb category’
- 9 March, Lia Litosseliti, City University of London, ‘Gender and language: theory and practice’
- 18 November, Christopher Shank, Bangor University, ‘Structural features as predictors for that/zero variation in mental state verbs: a diachronic corpus-based multivariate analysis’
- 2 December 2015, Charlotte Taylor, Sussex University, ‘Mock politeness: a corpus pragmatic study of perceptions and practice’
3.3 OX-LEX 2015
Kathryn Allan was one of the co-organisers of the OX-LEX conference in Oxford in March 2015. See also the Programme.
3.4 Looking forward: ISLE 2018
It’s two years away, but we thought we would already alert you to the fact that the fifth bi-annual conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE-5; www.isle-linguistics.org) will be held at University College London. Meanwhile, ISLE-4 will be held at Poznan.
4. 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, B. (2015) (with J. Bowie and S.A. Wallis) ‘Profiling the English verb phrase over time: modal patterns’. In: I. Taavitsainen, M. Kytö, C. Claridge and J. Smith (eds.). 48-76.
Aarts, B. (2015) ‘Online resources for grammar teaching’. Paper presented at Middlesex University.
Aarts, B. (2015) ‘Syntactic corpus annotation: the case in favour’. Paper presented at Annotations syntaxiques sur corpus: enjeux et perspectives, Université Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris.
Aarts, B. (2015) ‘For-to constructions in English’. Paper presented at the General Linguistics Seminar, University of Oxford.
Aarts, B. (2015) ‘Does English have a subordinator for?’ Plenary lecture at the 10th Language at the University of Essex Postgraduate Conference (LangUE), Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex.
Aarts, B. (2015) ‘The grammar of spoken English’. Plenary lecture First International Conference on English Language, Literature, Teaching and Translation Studies (CELLTTS). University of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Aijmer, K. and C. Rühlemann (2015)(eds.) Corpus pragmatics: a handbook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aijmer, K. (2015) ‘Pragmatic markers’. In: K. Aijmer and C. Rühlemann (2015)(eds.). 195-218.
Allan, K. (2015) ‘Education in the Historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: exploring diachronic change in a semantic field’. In: J. Daems, E. Zenner, K. Heylen, D. Speelman and H. Cuyckens (2015)(eds.), 81-96.
Allan, K. (2015) ‘Lost in transmission? The sense development of borrowed metaphor’. In: J. Diaz-Vera (ed.), 31-50.
Allan, K. (2015) ‘Mapping historical metaphor: surprising and astonishing developments’. Paper presented at the International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Newcastle University, July 2015.
Allan, K. (2015) ‘Degrees of lexicalization’ in the Historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Paper presented at a training workshop for the AHRC-funded project ‘The Linguistic DNA of Modern Western Thought’, University of Brighton.
Allan, K. (2015) ‘Education in the Historical thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary: exploring diachronic change in a semantic field. Paper presented at the seminar ‘Change of paradigms: New paradoxes’, in honour of Dirk Geeraerts, University of Leuven.
Allan, K. (2015) ‘A dull paper: an example of proportional analogy in semantic change?’ Paper presented at departmental seminar series, University of Glasgow.
Bowie, J. (2015) (with B. Aarts and S.A. Wallis) ‘Profiling the English verb phrase over time: modal patterns’. In: I. Taavitsainen, M. Kytö, C. Claridge and J. Smith (eds.). 48-76.
Daems, J., E. Zenner, K. Heylen, D. Speelman and H. Cuyckens (2015)(eds.) Change of paradigms – new paradoxes. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
De Felice, R. (2015) (with L. Murphy) ‘The politics of please in British and American English: a corpus pragmatics approach’. Paper presented at the 2015 Corpus Linguistics Conference, Lancaster University.
De Felice, R. (2015) ‘Understanding email politeness through corpus linguisics’. Invited seminar at the Department of Anglistik, Heidelberg University.
De Felice, R. (2015) (with E. Moreton) ‘Introducing the Corpus of Business English Correspondence: a resource for the lexicon and pragmatics of Business English’. Paper presented at the 36th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), University of Trier.
De Smet, H. (2015) ‘Participle clauses between adverbial and complement’. Word 61.1. 39-74.
Diaz-Vera, J. (2015) (ed.) Metaphor and metonymy across time and cultures. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Gilquin, G., S. Granger, and F. Meunier (2015)(eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Learner Corpus Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘Quantitative corpus approaches to linguistic analysis: seven or eight levels of resolution and the lessons they teach us’. In: I. Taavitsainen, M. Kytö, C. Claridge, and J. Smith (eds.), 29-47.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘Statistical methods in learner corpus research’ In: G. Gilquin, S. Granger, and F. Meunier (eds.), 159-181.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘More (old and new) misunderstandings of collostructional analysis: on Schmid and Küchenhoff (2013). Cognitive Linguistics 26.3. 505–536.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘Quantitative designs and statistical techniques’. In: D. Biber and R. Reppen (eds.), The Cambridge handbook of English corpus linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 50-71.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘The most underused statistical method in corpus linguistics: multi-level (and mixed-effects) models’. Corpora 10.1. 95-125.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘Structural priming: a perspective from observational data and usage-/exemplar-based approaches’. In: A. A. Kibrik, A. D. Koshelev, A. V. Kravchenko, J. V. Mazurova and O. V. Fedorova (eds.), Язык и мысль: Современная когнитивная лингвистика/Language and thought: Contemporary cognitive linguistics, 721-754. Moscow: Languages of Slavic Culture.
Gries, S. Th. (2015) ‘Some current quantitative problems in corpus linguistics and a sketch of some solutions’. Language and Linguistics 16.1. 93-117.
Hancil, S., A. Haselow, M. Post (2015)(eds.) Final Particles. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs [TiLSM] 284. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Heine, B., G. Kaltenböck and T. Kuteva (2015) ‘Some observations on the evolution of final particles’. In: S. Hancil, A. Haselow, and M. Post (2015)(eds.). 111-140.
Kaltenböck, G. (2015) ‘Processibility’. In: K. Aijmer and C. Rühlemann (2015)(eds.). 117-142.
Kay, C. and K. Allan. 2015. English historical semantics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Keizer, E. (2015) A functional discourse grammar for English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Taavitsainen, I., M. Kytö, C. Claridge and J. Smith (2015) (eds.) Developments in English: expanding electronic evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wallis, S.A. (2015) (with B. Aarts and J. Bowie) ‘Profiling the English verb phrase over time: modal patterns’. In: I. Taavitsainen, M. Kytö, C. Claridge and J. Smith (eds.). 48-76.
Wallis, S.A. (2015) ‘Adapting random-instance sampling variance estimates and Binomial models for random-text sampling’. London: Survey of English Usage. » corp.ling.stats » ePublished
Wallis, S.A. (2015) ICECUP help (3rd ed). London: Survey of English Usage. » ePublished
Wallis, S.A., G. Schneider, J. Lijffijt, V. Brezina, A. Hardie, S. Th. Gries, and P. Rayson. (2015) Statistics Panel at Corpus Linguistics 2015, Lancaster University.
Bas Aarts
Director
February 2016
This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by Survey Web Administrator.