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

• Full list of publications

See also:

• Survey of English Usage

This page last modified 15 September, 2009 by Bas Aarts.