Bas Aarts, MA, PhD

Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage

Email: b.aarts@ucl.ac.uk
Phone: 020 7679 3130

Education and Experience

I was born in the Netherlands and educated at the University of Utrecht and at UCL, where I obtained an MA and PhD in English Linguistics.

At UCL I teach English Linguistics to undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Since January 1997 I have been the Director of the Survey of English Usage (SEU). The SEU (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage) is an internationally recognised and highly regarded centre of excellence for research in the area of English Language and Linguistics. Founded by Professor the Lord Quirk in 1959, it is housed in the English Department at UCL. The SEU has been engaged in the study of the English language for more more than half a century. Quirk and Greenbaum are two of the authors of the Grammar of Contemporary English (Longman, 1972, with Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik), and the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, 1985, with Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik). These books have long been regarded as the standard reference grammars of Modern English. The Survey is also known for its pioneering work in the area of corpus linguistics. As a full list on the web of publications based on SEU material testifies, countless books, articles and postgraduate theses world-wide have been based on our three English language corpora, which constitute large collections of spoken and written language. These corpora are the Survey of English Usage Corpus, compiled by Quirk, the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), compiled by Greenbaum, and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), compiled by Aarts and Wallis. The ICE-GB corpus is a state-of-the art resource for English language studies. It can be searched using the innovative ICECUP software developed at the SEU. The corpus and its associated software is being used in scores of universities world-wide. A book on the ICE project, co-authored by Gerald Nelson Sean Wallis and myself, entitled Exploring natural languge: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English was published in July 2002. The SEU has attracted a large amount of research funding from a variety of sources (the AHRB, the British Academy, the ESRC, the EPSRC, UCL Business, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others).

Together with Wim van der Wurff at the Newcastle University and April McMahon at the University of Edinburgh I am editor of the scholarly journal English Language and Linguistics (ELL), which appears three times per year, and is published by Cambridge University Press. I am also the Reviews Editor of the journal. Publication is now in its fifteenth year. ELL is an international journal which focuses on the description of the English language within the framework of contemporary linguistics. The journal is concerned equally with the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of English language studies and publishes articles of the highest quality which make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the structure and development of the English language and which are informed by a knowledge and appreciation of linguistic theory. ELL was awarded a top A-rating in the 2007 and 2011 journals list of the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH).

I am on the Editorial Board of the Cambridge University Press monograph series Studies in English Language, and I'm on the Board of the journal English Language and Literature, published by the English Language and Literature Association of Korea (ELLAK).

I have held visiting appointments at the following universities: La Laguna, Spain (1997); Sofia, Bulgaria (1998); Zürich, Switzerland (1999); Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2000); Sarajevo and Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2001); Jaén, Spain (2004, 2005, 2006); Vigo, Spain (2007), and the Université Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 (2010-11). During the summer of 2007 I taught at the summer school of the Societas Linguistica Europaea in Campobasso, Italy.

I was elected Vice-President for the Profession of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE).

Research

My research interest within English language studies is in the field of syntax, more specifically verbal syntax. Both my PhD dissertation, which was published in 1992 (Small clauses in English: the nonverbal types, Mouton de Gruyter), and a book I edited with Charles F. Meyer (The verb in contemporary English: theory and description, Cambridge University Press, 1995) focus on this area.

In 1997 English syntax and argumentation, an undergraduate textbook which aims to teach students the fundamentals of syntax and linguistic argumentation, was first published by Macmillan in the Modern Linguistics series. The second edition was published in May 2001 by Palgrave with a Korean translation (by Professor Dong-hwan An of Busan University) in 2002. The third edition was published in April 2008.

A book on the syntactic exploration of the ICE-GB corpus, which I co-authored with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis, entitled Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English, was published in 2002 by John Benjamins.

The handbook of English linguistics, which I edited with April McMahon, was published by Blackwell in 2006. This book is a collection of articles written by leading specialists on all core areas of English linguistics and provides a state-of-the-art account of research in the field. A paperback was published in 2008.

My recent research has been on the phenomenon of gradience in grammar. With David Denison, Evelien Keizer and Gergana Popova I edited a book on this topic, namely Fuzzy grammar: a reader, published by Oxford University Press in 2004, and my monograph Syntactic gradience: the nature of grammatical indeterminacy was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. The latter is the first exhaustive investigation of gradience in syntax, conceived of as grammatical indeterminacy. It looks at gradience in English word classes, phrases, clauses and constructions, and examines how it may be defined and differentiated. I address the tension between linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe by testing and categorising grammatical vagueness and indeterminacy, and I consider to what extent gradience is a grammatical phenomenon or a by-product of imperfect linguistic description. I make a series of linked proposals for its theoretical formalisation. This book draws on, and reviews, work in psychology, philosophy and language from Aristotle to Chomsky, and deals with a fascinating and important aspect of language and cognition.

My Oxford modern English grammar was published early in 2011.

A book I edited with Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis entitled The verb phrase in English: investigating recent language change with corpora will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

I'm currently working on the fourth edition of English syntax and argumentation and the second edition of the Oxford dictionary of English grammar.

Publications and grants awarded

• Full list of publications and grants awarded

See also:

• Survey of English Usage

This page was last updated on March 29, 2012 .