Survey Annual Report 2025
The Survey of English Usage Annual Report is published annually.
1. News
1.1 Beth Malory
We are delighted that our colleague Beth Malory was selected as a BBC New Generation Thinker. She was chosen from a large number of applicants as one of the UK’s six most promising early career researchers in the Arts and Humanities.
New Generation Thinkers is “a scheme supported by the UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the BBC. Each year, a nationwide search identifies outstanding academics and helps them bring their research ideas to a broader audience on BBC radio. Selected from hundreds of applicants, these six researchers represent some of the brightest emerging minds in their fields. The New Generation Thinkers will collaborate with four Radio 4 teams across the UK, who work on programmes such as ‘Free Thinking’ and ‘Thinking Allowed’, weekly science programmes, ‘Front Row’ and ‘Woman’s Hour’.
Beth was also awarded the British Association of Applied Linguists’ Judith Baxter Award, 2025, which “champions excellent new research in language, gender and sexuality. It recognises the work of one promising new researcher in language, gender and sexuality per year, offering financial support for research activities, and a funded place at the annual BAAL Language, Gender and Sexuality special interest group (SIG) meeting, at which the recipient will present their work.”
1.2 Luke Pearce
After many years working on the Englicious project (see below), Luke Pearce left UCL for pastures new. We thank him for his many contributions to the website and to the teaching of CPD courses.
1.3 Survey website
Recent visitors to the Survey website will have noticed that in 2025 it underwent a dramatic redesign.
It has also now moved location from www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage to an address within the UCL Arts and Humanities Faculty website (the old link will redirect a reader to the new location).
Most of the website content has been transferred, but it may be organised in a slightly different way. We are continuing to update and upload content. We have prioritised our corpus resources and research projects to support the linguistics community.
If you currently link to content or pages on our site, you will probably need to update your links. For any queries, please contact Sean Wallis, who will endeavour to help.
1.4 Funding
Survey colleagues were awarded the following funding in 2025
| October 2025 –October 2027 | Securing the future of the Englicious platform for schools — Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis | £10,000 |
| Lord Randolph Quirk Small Project Fund | ||
| July 2024 – July 2025 | Establishing the Reproductive and Sexual Health Communication Alliance — Beth Malory (PI) | £12,567 |
| UCL Public Policy Expert Engagement Award | ||
| April 2025 – February 2027 | RECENTRE (Understanding Epidemics in Pregnant and Lactating People and Infants: an Interdisciplinary Network) — Beth Malory (Co-I) | £754,872.45 |
| Wellcome Trust | ||
| March 2025 – February 2026 | BESPPOKE (Building on Established Stakeholder Partnerships for Pregnancy loss communication, to Optimise Knowledge Exchange) — Beth Malory (PI) | £19,954.24 |
| UCL Higher Education Innovation Fund | ||
| February 2025 – September 2025 | UCL Knowledge Broker Academy — Beth Malory (PI) | £4,676.54 |
| ESRC Impact Acceleration Account | ||
| December 2024 – July 2025 | CO-produced Mathematical Modelling of Epidemics Together (COMMET) — Beth Malory (Co-I) | £1,246,796 |
| UKRI | ||
| March 2025 | Early Warnings for all?: Language in Early Warnings systems in the Caribbean — Guyanne Wilson (PI) | £18,437.45 |
| UCL Knowledge Exchange Grant | ||
| October 2025 – October 2027 | Extension of From Old English to World Englishes: a roving exhibition — Guyanne Wilson, Kathryn Allan, Amy Faulkner (PIs) | £2,752.02 |
| Lord Randloph Quirk Small Project Fund | ||
1.5 Bas Aarts’s Substack
Bas Aarts writes a Substack on English grammar where he regularly posts on English grammar in general, but with a special focus on sentence analysis, intended for those who know some grammar already.
2. Research
2.1 Selected recent research highlights
Allan, (2026) Historical Semantics. In: L. Wright and R. Hickey (eds.) The New Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 1: Context, Contact and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 611-665.
The questions of how and why words change meaning are integral to any history of English. Semantic change is complex, since it always takes place in a particular social and historical context, and one change in the system may lead to others. Words also have different meanings at different times for different speakers, and the neat descriptions of changes that are often presented in the literature do not always take account of the polysemy that is always involved. After a summary of the evolution of this branch of historical linguistics, this chapter describes different tendencies in semantic change, and the ways in which changes can be motivated, offering a structural classification of such change. It goes on to consider change in each period of the history of English, exploring the meaning of compounds in Old English, the relationship between the meanings of borrowed words and their etymons in Middle and Early Modern English, and the impact of conscious efforts to change the meanings and usage of socially sensitive words in Late Modern English. Each section is informed by detailed discussions of varied semantic histories, drawn from a range of historical and contemporary dictionaries, corpora and text collections.
Bowie, J. and B. Aarts, B. Recent grammatical change in English (2025) In: J. Beal (ed.) New Cambridge history of the English language, Volume III Transmission, change and ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 505-535.
This chapter surveys the field of recent grammatical change in English. It focuses on the period since 1900 but also discuss how certain recent changes relate to longer-term trends. Many of the examples involve the verb phrase or verbal complementation, but changes in other areas such as the noun phrase are also noted. The authors address methodological issues that arise in researching recent change, considering the various kinds of corpora available and the complexities involved in tracking grammatical change over time. They then discuss how patterns of change vary between spoken and written language and across different genres. Finally, they consider a range of possible explanations or motivations for change, including grammaticalization, economy and social influences.
Malory, B. (2025). Language, gender, and pregnancy loss. Cambridge University Press.
This Cambridge Element explores the gendered dimensions of the ways language used to describe, define, and diagnose pregnancy loss impacts experiences of receiving and delivering healthcare in a UK context. It situates experiences of pregnancy loss language against the backdrop of gender role expectations, ideological tensions around reproductive choice, and medical misogyny; asking how language both reflects and influences contemporary gender norms and understandings of maternal responsibility. To do this, the Element analyses 10 focus group transcripts from metalinguistic discussions with 42 lived experience and healthcare professional participants, and 202 written metalinguistic contributions from the same cohorts. It demonstrates the gendered social and symbolic meanings of diagnostic terminology such as miscarriage, incompetent cervix, and termination or abortion in the context of a wanted pregnancy, as well as clinical discourses, on the experience of pregnancy loss and subsequent recovery and wellbeing. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Malory, B. and E. Parr (2025). ‘“It just made me feel very broken”: misogyny and discriminatory hierarchisation in British English pregnancy loss terminology’. Journal of Language and Discrimination. https://doi.org/10.3138/jld-2025-1007
This research explores attitudes to diagnostic terminology for pregnancy loss in contemporary British English, amongst participants with experience of receiving and delivering care during and after pregnancy loss. A total of 339 contributions, gathered via focus groups and written testimonies, were collected and analysed using thematic and discourse analytic procedures. These revealed that much of this terminology is associated with discourses of loss as a failure of the pregnant body. This compounds the pervasive assumption in western Anglophone cultures that the bodies of women and other birthing people are solely responsible for pregnancy outcomes, contributing to medical misogyny in maternity care. Separately, study data also highlighted perceptions of a discriminatory model of pregnancy loss care, perpetuated by language, which invalidates the grief and trauma of those experiencing loss at earlier gestations, despite mounting evidence of long-lasting psychological ramifications. This study thus reveals pregnancy loss terminology in British English as a site of fossilised gendered prejudice.
Malory, B., L. Nuttall and A. Heazell (2025). ‘Acceptable nomenclature for pregnancy loss care: a cross-sectional observational survey’. British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
This study conducted a pilot study evaluating the acceptability of pregnancy loss nomenclature among people with recent lived experience and make recommendations for UK mass communication. The results showed that much nomenclature currently in use in UK pregnancy loss care was rated ‘unacceptable’ by a majority of study participants. Spontaneous abortion, incompetent cervix, and cervical incompetence were among the terminology rated as ‘unacceptable’ by > 80.0% of the respondents rating terms for the process of loss. In contrast, pregnancy loss and ectopic pregnancy were rated ‘acceptable’ by > 80.0% of respondents. As nomenclature for pregnancy loss outcomes, products, contents of the womb/uterus, and tissue were rated ‘unacceptable’ by > 80.0% of respondents. Baby and ‘their given name’ were rated ‘acceptable’ by > 80.0% of respondents across all gestational age brackets. Some terminology elicited mixed acceptability ratings. The study concluded that some pregnancy loss nomenclature attracted consensus acceptability or unacceptability ratings for respondents. The data inform evidence-based recommended alternatives, which should be adopted for mass communications relating to pregnancy loss.
Malory, B. (2025). ‘Language guidelines as the frontier of anti-prejudicial prescriptivism’. In: J. Setter, S. Dovchin and V. Ramjattan (eds.) The Oxford handbook of language and prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 623-643.
This chapter explores the philosophical, theoretical, and moral implications for linguists of participation in anti-prejudicial prescriptivism; for example, via involvement in the production of language guidance aimed at promoting inclusivity and eliminating linguistic manifestations of prejudice. It explores anti-prejudicial prescriptivism as a flashpoint for theoretical conflict for linguists, who, though traditionally trained as ardent descriptivists, are increasingly becoming involved in the prescription of lexical variants intended to challenge cultural prejudice, and the proscription of variants considered prejudicial or offensive. Without formalized mechanisms for production of such anti-prejudicial prescriptivism, recommended and proscribed variants are often selected arbitrarily; based on intuition and not empirical determinants. Situating current attitudes to prescriptivism within linguistics in the context of the discipline’s history, the chapter calls for a theoretical framework which acknowledges linguists’ capacity to help challenge prejudice and to distinguish between linguistic prescriptivism perpetuating prejudice and linguistic prescriptivism challenging prejudice.
Sylvester, L., K. Allan, M. Tiddeman and R. Ingham (2025) Language contact and semantic development in late medieval English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
The multilingual context of medieval Britain has been a focus of historical linguistic scholarship for some time, but Middle English has often been examined in isolation. This book analyses a large dataset of English vocabulary from the late Middle Ages, a time when the language was gaining new importance, with attention paid to parallel lexical developments in French and Latin. It explores lexical and semantic innovations and losses, and its findings challenge the notion that native and borrowed words were in competition during the period. The book presents a new picture of ongoing bilingualism in the late medieval period and a growth in vocabulary that heralded the beginnings of standardization in English.
Wilson, G. (2025) ‘Our speech defines us’: the language of Caribbean female prime ministers. In: R. J. Sandow and N. Braber (2025) (eds.) Sociolinguistic approaches to lexical variation in English.
This chapter explores the ways Caribbean prime ministers use language to construct their identities as national leaders. A keyword analysis was conducted on a corpus of speeches by three female heads of government to identify lexical items that are frequently used by the women. Overall, the prime ministers employ lexical features that have come to be associated both with women’s language and with successful political speeches, such as the use of first-person plural pronouns, and deliver speeches with an overwhelmingly positive tenor. However, these features are not necessarily motivated by gender and often appear to be linked to the historical point of the women’s respective mandates, the context of the speech, and individual speaking styles.
Wyse, D. (with B. Aarts, J. Anders, A. de Gennaro, J. Dockrell, Y. Manyukhina, S. Sing & C. Torgerson (2025) Teaching grammar and writing: a randomised controlled trial and implementation process evaluation of Englicious. Journal of Writing Research.
Very few research studies of the teaching of grammar and writing had been carried out with children younger than eight-years-old prior to the research reported in this paper. The research evaluated a new approach to teaching grammar and writing called Englicious. A Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) and Implementation and Process Evaluation (IPE) research design, featuring 1,246 pupils aged six to seven-years-old in 70 primary school classes, was used to evaluate the effectiveness of Englicious for improving children’s writing. The approach was implemented in the context of the programs of study for grammar teaching in England’s national curriculum. The research found that there was no effect of the grammar teaching intervention on pupils’ narrative writing. The effect size for pupils’ sentence generation was sufficient to merit reflections about potential impacts of aspects of the intervention although this outcome also did not reach statistical significance. It is hypothesised that the manipulation of words, phrases and sentences, combined with practice at writing, may have contributed to any positive effect, although this would need to be confirmed in future research. It is concluded that until more research is done to investigate the effectiveness of different approaches to teaching grammar and writing with young children, existing evidence-based approaches are more likely to be effective to help young pupils’ narrative writing. England’s national curriculum specifications for teaching grammar and writing could usefully be reviewed to more closely reflect the evidence base from this field of writing research.
For a full overview of Publications, talks etc., see section 6.
2.2 Survey Seminars
Survey seminars are occasions when staff and students at the Survey of English Usage invite scholars to share their research outputs. The seminars are open to everyone, and are announced on the Survey website (see ‘Events’). The following research seminars took place during 2025.
11 February 2025, Amanda Thompson (Oxford English Dictionary)
Language, linguistics, and lexicography: revising the OED in 2025
The lexicographic methods and resources available to editors of the Oxford English Dictionary have been in constant development since the project’s origins in the 19th century. This talk will give an insight into the techniques that today’s editors use in bringing the dictionary up to date, with an overview of the steps taken to transform a 100-year-old entry into one that meets the demands of a modern reader.
4 March 2025, Kingsley Ugwuanyi, School of Oriental and African Studies
Codifying Nigerian English: progress, politics and challenges
The codification of Nigerian English has progressed significantly in recent decades, yet debates surrounding its legitimacy and standardisation persist. While the variety has been extensively documented in linguistic scholarship, its institutionalisation remains contested.
14 October 2025, Lynne Murphy, University of Sussex
The magic words: please and thank you in American and British English
Various corpus studies have found that please and thank*(i.e. thanks or thank you) occur in inverse proportions in American and British English, with British using please at around twice the rate of Americans and Americans thanking up to twice as much as Britons. Given such a severe difference, we have to wonder: do these words perform the same functions in the two countries?
27 November 2025, Maarten Lemmens, University of Lille
‘This doesn’t sit well in English’: what has happened to English posture verbs?
In the Germanic languages, the posture verbs LIE, SIT, and STAND, generally cover a large semantic field and in contrast to, for example, Romance languages, the use of these verbs is often obligatory when one wants to express the location of an entity in space, or in metaphorical extensions thereof. In most Germanic languages, these verbs have also grammaticalized to semi-auxiliaries in constructions that have a progressive value (e.g., Jag sitter och läser / Ik zit te lezen / I sit and read).
Keep an eye on the Survey website for our 2026 talks!
3. Events
3.1 English Grammar Day 2025
The English Grammar Day 2025, organised by the Survey of English Usage, the British Library and the University of Oxford, took place at the British Library in its Knowledge Centre on Monday 7 July.
The speakers were Billy Clark, Sarah Kirk-Browne, Simon Horobin, Beth Malory, Holy Wimbush, Zarah Shah, and Rob Drummond.
The programme was as follows:
- Billy Clark (Northumbria University), Puzzling linguists: olympians and others
- Sarah Kirk-Browne (Queen Mary University of London & The British Library), 100 years of continuity and change in spoken English: the Regional English Dialects Diachronic (REDD) corpus project
- Simon Horobin (University of Oxford), What’s happening to English spelling?
- Beth Malory (University College London), “Four queer men in the UK have contracted monkeypox”: grammar, agency, and stigma in media reporting of mpox outbreaks
- Holly Wimbush and Zarah Shah (school teachers), Grammar as a moral imperative: power, identity, and equity in the English classroom
- Rob Drummond (Manchester Metropolitan University), Attitudes towards (non)standard grammar: the need for balance
- Read the programme and abstracts of the talks
Below are short videos from the 2024 event.
A review of the day was published by Peter Clark on his Language Miscellany blog.
In 2026 the English Grammar Day will be at the British Library on Monday 29 June 2026. You can book a place at the British Library website in due course.
3.2 Symposium on Challenges in Pregnancy Loss Communication
Beth Malory hosted the third Symposium on Challenges in Pregnancy Loss Communication at UCL in June 2025 with 20 invited delegates from around the UK and internationally. These included eminent clinicians working in obstetrics and gynaecology, including representatives of the National Centre for Miscarriage Research, of project partner organizations Tommy’s and Sands, and collaborators Antenatal Results and Choices and The Ectopic Pregnancy Trust, and professional bodies including the Royal College of Midwives and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
The 2025 Symposium saw the launch of the Reproductive and Sexual Health Communication Alliance, which aims to bring together academics, clinicians, and third sector organisations with an interest in improving experiences of communication in reproductive and sexual healthcare, where systematic inequalities mean that communication challenges can pose serious problems.
3.3 The From Old English to World Englishes project
In June, the first year of Guyanne, Kathryn and Amy’s From Old English to World Englishes project ended with an event in Foster Court held especially for members of the College. Attendees had the chance to interact with different elements of our interactive exhibition, contribute to our ever-expanding word bunting and heard short talks about the project from the team, Max and Morenike (two of the undergraduate students involved in the project), and from our project partner, Dr Danica Salazar of the Oxford English Dictionary. The project runs until 2027.
From Old English to World Englishes was featured in an episode of UCL’s Equality Diversity and Inclusion Dialogues. Listen here as Guyanne and Kathryn talk with student helper Maya about the project.
3.4 Oxford English Dictionary Seminar
In connection with the From Old English to World Englishes project, Guyanne Wilson, Kathryn Allan and Amy Faulkner appeared on the Oxford English Dictionary webinar session Tracking the history of English with the Oxford English Dictionary. You can view the seminar here.
3.5 Workshop at ISLE
Guyanne Wilson organised the one-day workshop Building Historical Corpora in World Englishes Kate Wild (OED) and Danica Salazar (OED) at the International Society for the Linguistics of English Conference, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
3.6 Lunch for Linguists
In September 2025, with help from colleagues in the department and around the college, Kathryn Allan organised a ‘Lunch for Linguists’, attended by over 40 staff members and research students from across UCL, including the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, the Institute of Education, the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences and the Special Collections. This was relaxed occasion which provided an opportunity to meet others with common interests and talk informally, and looks set to become an annual event which departments will take turns to host. The event was supported by funding from both the Lord Randolph Quirk Endowment and the Survey of English Usage.
3.7 Quirk Symposium 2025
Bas Aarts, Beth Malory, Guyanne Wilson and Amy Faulkner presented talks at the Quirk Symposium at UCL. Beth spoke on evidence-based healthcare communication, while Guyanne presented on the first insights gained from her fieldwork in Guyana for her Early Warnings for all project. Amy spoke about the From Old English to World Englishes project focusing on ‘Research beyond the University’.
4. Software
3.1 ICECUP
ICECUP is our state-of-art corpus exploration platform for parsed corpora developed by Sean Wallis. The very latest version of ICECUP 3.1.1 is available from our website including free sample corpora from either DCPSE or ICE-GB, and of course is distributed with our full corpora. The software is compatible with Windows computers from XP to 11, and 32 and 64 bit Windows, and can be run on Windows Servers, and Macs using emulator software.
In his 2021 book, Statistics in Corpus Linguistics Research, Sean showed how researchers may use ICECUP and the parse analysis to:
- frame or narrow research questions, specifying a specific grammatical context for a linguistic event, X,
- explore lexical-grammatical permutations and variables (explore a set of events X comprising subcategories x1, x2, etc.), and
- relate neighbouring linguistic events (e.g. where event X is a conjoin just before another event Y, Y is a component of X, etc).
A Second Edition of the book will be published in 2026.
ICECUP continues to be maintained and developed, although we take a deliberate stance of limiting non-critical updates to ensure stability of research reporting.
5. Teaching
5.1 Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics
Our twelfth Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics took place online from Wedneday 25 to Friday 27 June 2025, and featured sessions from Guyanne Wilson, Bas Aarts, Beth Malory and Sean Wallis.
We had over thirty attendees from fifteen countries. This event was timed to allow everyone from Europe to Japan to attend.
This year’s Summer School will take place from Wednesday 24 June to Friday 26 June 2026, and we plan to reprise the successful programme from last year.
5.2 The UCL/Meiji Seminar in English Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics
On 8 and 9 July a large contingent of students from the English Department of one of Japan’s top Universities, Meiji University in Tokio, attended a specially designed Summer School in English Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics, organised by the Survey of English Usage.
This two-day course featured sessions taught by Sean Wallis, Beth Malory and Bas Aarts on various topics, including using corpora for syntactic studies, grammar and corpus methodology. The SEU has a long a fruitful relationship with Meiji University, which we hope will extend well into the future.
5.3 UCL Summer School
Guyanne Wilson taught a new course as part of the UCL Summer School: Language in London: an introduction to sociolinguistics. The three-week course was well-received and will run again in the Summer of 2026. It is an in-person course open to undergraduates worldwide.
5.4 School visits
Bas Aarts and Guyanne Wilson taught a contingent of A-level students from William Perkin School Church of English High School in Greenford, Middlesex a seminar on Methodology.
The From Old English to World Englishes project held two public events at Lewis Carroll Library and Brixton Tate Library in May 2025. The events were attended by primary schools in the area as well as general visitors to the Brixton Tate Library. We also held a workshop at UCL East as part of UCL’s Widening Participation initiatives.
As part of Early Warnings for All? project, two workshops were held at schools in Trinidad. The workshops were carried out in collaboration with The Art of Writing, a literacy and arts initiative, who led the students through several activities, culminating in the creation of their own early warnings as memes.
5.5 New Continuous Professional Development course
Beth Malory and Louise Nutall designed a new course entitled Effective Communication for Pregnancy Loss Care on the FutureLearn platform. This two-week course explores how language can support individuals through their recovery and healing. Drawing on UK-based research into lived experiences, participants will gain practical skills to communicate sensitively about pregnancy loss and offer meaningful support to people affected by this.
5.6 English grammar CPD for school teachers
The Survey offers a number of other online Continuous Professional Development (CPD) courses to teachers in primary and secondary schools who need to teach the requirements for grammar, punctuation and spelling in the National Curriculum for England. We teach this course online, in schools, and on the FutureLearn platform.
- English Grammar for Teachers: a subject knowledge course covering the fundamentals of National Curriculum English grammar, relevant for KS1-5 teachers.
- Teaching English Grammar in Context: a course for KS3-5 teachers, where we explore methods, tools and approaches for teaching grammar in relation to literary and other texts.
The Survey also offers bespoke courses for teachers in schools (INSET courses). For more information, email the Survey.
For teachers who prefer to learn online at their own pace, English Grammar for Teachers and Teaching English Grammar in Context are also available on FutureLearn, an online course platform.
Newly available on the same platform is a grammar course aimed at the general public, called English Grammar: All You Need to Know.
As the National Curriculum for England has now gone through a review by former UCL Professor Becky Francis, we await more details about how the recommendations from her committee will be implemented.
5.7 The Englicious project
The Englicious project is continually being enhanced with new functionality and resources. As reported above, this year Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis were awarded funding from the Lord Randolph Quirk Small Project Fund of £10K to update of the infrastructure of the Englicious platform to the latest version of Drupal and to redesign the website for better accessibility and navigation.
We have continued developing and publishing classroom materials on the Englicious website, including lessons on vocabulary based on the work of Professor Gabrielle Stein, which she kindly made available to us before she passed away.
For more information, please email the Survey.
If you haven’t yet heard of Englicious, here’s some information about the site:
What is Englicious?
- an entirely free online library of original English language teaching resources, especially grammar.
- closely tailored to the linguistic content of 2014 National Curriculum for England
- relevant for students and teachers at Key Stages 1-5.
- includes grammar, punctuation and spelling test practice material.
- uses examples from natural language corpora.
Englicious will help students:
- learn about English grammar in a fun way, using interactive online resources, including exercises, projects and games, all of which can be projected onto an interactive whiteboard
- develop their literacy skills, with a focus on spelling, punctuation and writing
- stimulate their enjoyment of (using) language, both in spoken and written form
- enhance their confidence
- improve their test scores, especially the Year 2 and Year 6 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling tests in UK schools
Englicious offers teachers:
- year-by-year overview of the new programmes of study and attainment targets in the 2014 UK National Curriculum
- hundreds of fully prepared lesson plans, including everything from bite-sized starters to larger projects, for use in the classroom
- assessments for evaluating student attainment and progress
- a complete and rigorous overview of English grammar
- the entire 2014 National Curriculum Glossary, enhanced with new terminology enabling teachers to use terminology consistently throughout the Key Stages
- professional development materials for teachers to brush up on their own knowledge
5.8 MA in English Linguistics
Most Survey colleagues teach on the MA in English Linguistics (with pathways in ‘English Corpus Linguistics’ and ‘English in Use’) which attracts students from all over the world.
Our graduates have gone on to PhD scholarships in the UK and abroad, as well as careers in teaching, publishing, and public relations.
6. Social Media
The Survey has three blogs:
- Bas Aarts’s new Substack on English grammar.
- Bas Aarts’s Grammarianism blog.
- Sean Wallis’s corp.ling.stats blog.
You can follow us on X (Twitter) via @UCLEnglishUsage and @EngliciousUCL.
We have the following accounts on Bluesky.
7. Publications, conference presentations, talks, dissertations and other studies using Survey material
Please let us know if you would like us to include your publications based on SEU material. We would appreciate it if you send us offprints of any such publications.
Aarts, B. (2025) Verb phrases as attributive nominal modifiers. In: E. Duran Eppler, N. Gisborne and A. Rosta (eds.) Word Grammar, cognition and dependency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 231-251.
Aarts, B. and G. Wilson (2025) Quirk, Randolph (1920-2017). In: K. Bolton (ed.) The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of World Englishes. Malden MA: Wiley Blackwell. (doi:10.1002/9781119518297)
Aarts, B. (2025) ‘Using the corpora of UCL’s Survey of English Usage for researching and teaching English grammar’. Research seminar for the English linguistics programme at the Complutense University, Madrid.
Aarts, B. ‘An introduction to the Englicious resource’ and ‘Grammar as a toolbox for creative writing strategies’. Talks presented at a workshop for the project Collaboration for Advancing Classroom Teaching (CoACT) at the Mid Sweden University in Sundsvall, Sweden.
Allan, K. (2025) Historical semantics. In: L. Wright and R. Hickey (eds.) The new Cambridge history of the English language, Volume 1: Context, contact and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 611-665.
Allan, K. (with L. Sylvester, M. Tiddeman and R. Ingham (2025) Language contact and semantic development in late medieval English. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Allan, K. and B. Malory (2025) ‘As if the womb were hired by men, as Merchants ships are to be fraited by them: the discursive construction of pregnancy across the history of English’. Paper presented at the 4th conference in the series Culture and Cognition in Language, Polańczyk, Poland.
Bowie, J. and B. Aarts (2025) Recent grammatical change in English. 2025. In: Joan Beal (ed.) New Cambridge history of the English language, Volume III Transmission, change and ideology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 505-535.
Fernández-Pena, Y., G. Kaltenböck and J. Pérez-Guerra (2025) ‘Fragments: a usage-based view’. English Language and Linguistics 28(3). 447-464.
Malory, B. (2025). Language, gender, and pregnancy loss. Cambridge University Press.
Malory, B., Nuttall, L. and Heazell, A.E.P. (2025) ‘Acceptable nomenclature for pregnancy loss care: a cross-sectional observational survey’. British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. (doi:10.1111/1471-0528.70057)
Malory, B. (2025) Language guidelines as the frontier of anti-prejudicial prescriptivism. In: J. Setter, S. Dovchin and V. Ramjattan (eds.) The Oxford handbook of language and prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 623-643.
Malory, B. and E. Parr (2025) ‘“It just made me feel very broken”: misogyny and discriminatory hierarchisation in British English pregnancy loss terminology’. Journal of Language and Discrimination.
Malory, B., M. Le Prevost, E. Nicholls, D. Bilardi, A. Choudhry and S. Tariq (2025) ‘British news media representations of mpox during the 2022 and 2024 outbreaks: a mixed-methods analysis using corpus linguistics’.
Norbury, C., J. Rodd, B. Malory and A. Gowenlock (2025) The corpus of children’s video media (CCVM).
Malory, B. (2025) ‘Promoting evidence-based approaches to communicating about reproductive health and healthcare’. Invited talks at the National Institute for Health Research Policy Research Unit for Reproductive Health, London
Malory, B. (2025) ‘“It just made me feel very broken”: self-reported experiences of medical misogyny in UK pregnancy loss consultations’. Talk at the 2025 International Consortium for Communication in Healthcare Symposium, Lancaster.
Malory, B. (2025) ‘Translating metalinguistic attitudes into lexical reform in healthcare and policy? Pregnancy Loss terminology in British English’. Paper presented at the conference Langues et langage à la croisée des disciplines, Lille, France.
Malory, B. (2025) ‘British news media representations of the 2022 and 2024 mpox outbreaks: a corpus-assisted study’. Paper presented at the Corpus Linguistics 2025 conference, Birmingham.
Malory, B. (2025) ‘Eliminating fossilised misogyny from diagnostic lexis: the case of pregnancy loss terminology in British English’. Judith Baxter Lecture at the British Association of Applied Linguists annual Special Interest Group seminar on ‘Language, Gender, and Sexuality’, Manchester.
Malory, B. (2025) ‘Translating metalinguistic attitudes into lexical reform in healthcare? Pregnancy Loss terminology in British English’. Paper presented at the British Association of Applied Linguists annual Special Interest Group on ‘Health and Science Communication’, Lancaster.
Sha, Y. and B. Malory (2025) ‘Using ATLAS.ti for constructing and analysing multimodal social media corpora’. Linguistics Vanguard, 11(1). 511–523. (doi:10.1515/lingvan-2024-0200)
Ozón, G. and M. Green (2025) Light verbs on the contact continuum. In: R. Sandow and N. Braber (2025) Sociolinguistic approaches to lexical variation in English. Abingdon: Routledge. 138-156.
Schmidt, K., S. Götz-Lehmann, K. Jäschke and S. Th. Gries (2025) ‘Same, same, but, erm, sort of different? Comparing fluencemes across Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealand English’. Paper presented at ICAME46, Vilnius, Lithuania.
Wilson, G. (2025) “Our speech defines us”: the language of Caribbean female prime ministers. In: N. Bradber and R. Sandow (Eds.), Sociolinguistic Approaches to Lexical Variation in English. Routledge.
Wilson, G. (2025) “Don’t Jack*** the Thing”: language use and political discontent by Trinidadian TikTokers. In: S. Ruediger, S. Leukert and J. Leimgruber (eds.) World Englishes and social media: platforms, variation, and meta-discourse (pp.). Lomdon: Bloomsbury. 95-118. (doi:10.5040/9781350421448)
Wilson, G. (2025) Caribbean, Language and Identity in the. In: K. Bolton (ed.), The Wiley Blackwell encyclopedia of World Englishes. Malden MA: Wiley Blackwell. 1-19.
Wilson, G. (2025) ‘Language and identity in the Windrush generation’. World Englishes 44(1–2).300–315 (doi:10.1111/weng.12701)
Wilson, G. (2025) ‘Early warnings for all?: the language of early warning systems’. Paper presented at the International Association of World Englishes, Giessen, Germany.
Wilson, G. (2025) ‘Beyond newspapers: increasing the range of written text-types in the Historical Corpus of English in Trinidad’. Paper presented at the International Association of World Englishes, Giessen, Germany.
Wyse, D., B. Aarts, J. Anders, A. de Gennaro, J. Dockrell, Y. Manyukhina, S. Sing & C. Torgerson (2025) ‘Teaching grammar and writing: a randomised controlled trial and implementation process evaluation of Englicious’. Journal of Writing Research.
Bas Aarts
Director
January 2026

