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.
Together with David Denison at the University of Manchester 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
thirteenth 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 has been awarded a top rating of 'A' in the 2007 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 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 current research is on the phenomenon of gradience
in grammar. A recent publication on this topic is Fuzzy
Grammar: a Reader, published by Oxford University Press
in 2004, and edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer
and Gergana Popova. My monograph Syntactic
Gradience: the Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy was
published by Oxford University Press in 2007. This book 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.
I am currently working on a new book provisionally entitled The
Oxford Grammar of contemporary English.
Publications
See also:
This page last modified
15 September, 2009
by Bas Aarts.
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