Jill Bowie

Research Fellow, Survey of English Usage
j.bowie@ucl.ac.uk

Research

My research interests include English syntax and morphology, language evolution and change, semantics and pragmatics, and the grammatical analysis of informal discourse both in the spoken mode and in recent digital modes such as texting and Twitter.

I am currently working on the Teaching English Grammar in Schools project. Our team is creating a website of materials for secondary English education, with a focus on the grammatical structure of the language. In creating the materials, we draw extensively on the rich resources of authentic English provided by the Survey's computerised corpora.

I previously worked on the project The Changing Verb Phrase in Present-Day British English. In this project we contributed to the emerging research area of 'recent change' in syntax. We used data from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) to investigate morphosyntactic changes in the English verb phrase from the 1960s to the 1990s.

Education

I completed a PhD on language evolution at the University of Reading in 2008. Previously, I gained a BA in linguistics and an MA in applied linguistics at the University of Queensland in Australia, where I also worked as a Research Assistant on the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language project team led by Professor Rodney Huddleston.

Publications

Aarts, Bas, Sean Wallis and Jill Bowie (forthcoming 2013). Profiling the English verb phrase over time: modal patterns. In: Irma Taavitsainen, Merja Kytö, Claudia Claridge and Jeremy Smith (eds.), Developments in English: expanding electronic evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. » Draft version of paper (PDF).

Bowie, Jill (2008). Proto-discourse and the emergence of compositionality. Interaction Studies 9(1), 18–33. (In special issue of journal edited by Michael A. Arbib and Derek Bickerton, and republished 2010 in Benjamins Current Topics series as The emergence of protolanguage: holophrasis vs compositionality. Amsterdam; Philadelphia: Benjamins.)

Bowie, Jill, and Bas Aarts (forthcoming 2012). Change in the English infinitival perfect construction. In: Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.) The Oxford handbook of the history of English: rethinking approaches to the history of English. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. » Draft version of paper (PDF).

Bowie, Jill, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts (forthcoming 2012). Contemporary change in modal usage in spoken British English: mapping the impact of 'genre'. In: Johan Van der Auwera and Juana I. Marín Arrese (eds.), Current issues on evidentiality and modality in English: theoretical, descriptive and contrastive studies. Mouton de Gruyter. » Draft version of paper (PDF).

Bowie, Jill, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts (forthcoming 2012). The perfect in spoken British English. In: Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis (eds.) The English verb phrase: corpus methodology and current change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. » Draft version of paper (PDF).

 

This page last modified 25 April, 2013 by Survey Web Administrator.