The Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2001
1. General
We are pleased to announce that the handbook to accompany ICE-GB has now gone to press and will be available soon. It is published under the title Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English by John Benjamins in Amsterdam. The new version of ICECUP (3.1) is due to be released towards the middle of 2002. It will include the facility to play back the spoken texts in the corpus. (The sound files are in MP3 format, and will be sold separarely. See also below.) Current users of the software will be able to upgrade at a small cost. For those who didn’t already know: Gerry Nelson is now the coordinator of the ICE project, having succeeded Chuck Meyer. Gerry has set up a website at the University of Hong Kong which also contains samples of audio material from the various ICE corpora. Please click here to visit the site (*now at UCL). We thank Chuck for his work on the project over the years.
Valerie Adams retired from her post in the English Department last year. The Department of English Language and Literature at University College London will advertise a new lectureship in April or May for a specialist in Modern English Language, to commence in September 2002. The preferred candidate will be a syntactician with a PhD in English Linguistics, and will have teaching and research experience. If you are interested in this post please keep an eye on the Times Higher Education Supplement in the UK (http://www.jobs.thes.co.uk) and on http://www.jobs.ac.uk. Details will also be announced on various lists, including the Linguist List.
We are pleased to announce that the English Department here at UCL (of which the Survey is a part) received a 5* rating in the latest round of the UK Research Assessment Exercise 2001. See www.rae.ac.uk.
2. Research
New Projects
The Survey obtained funding to start a new project entitled Creating a parsed and searchable diachronic corpus of present-day spoken English. The project is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC; grant R000239643).
At the core of this research project are two corpora of Modern British English, both founded at the Survey: the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), compiled in the 1960s, and the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), compiled in the 1990s. The aim of the project is to construct a fully parsed and searchable diachronic corpus of spontaneous spoken English, containing carefully selected, directly comparable texts from the LLC and ICE-GB. This corpus will be a unique resource for linguists studying the spoken English of a period spanning 25-30 years. There is currently no comparable resource available, and the corpus will be the first of its kind enabling research into current change in spoken language. The project will start on 1 August 2002. A full description of the project can be viewed here.
Ongoing Projects
The English noun phrase: an empirical study
Our project on the English noun phrase (www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/noun-phrase/index.htm) has now reached the half-way mark, and is progressing very well. Evelien Keizer (the principal researcher on the project) is preparing a monograph, and has already produced a number of publications. Topics addressed so far include binominal constructions introduced by sort-of/kind-of/type-of, close appositions, of-appositions and discontinuous noun phrases. Attention will next be focussed on the relation between complementation, modification and apposition and on the relation between determination and modification in noun phrases.
ICE-GB
Sean Wallis has been developing the ICECUP software in readiness for the release of version 3.1 in 2002. The new software contains a completely integrated lexicon and grammaticon of ICE-GB, and supports a number of useful extensions to searching with Fuzzy Tree Fragments, including wildcard searches and logical expressions within FTFs. It also supports the synchronous playback of recorded speech. Technical issues have delayed the release of the sound recordings of the ICE-GB spoken texts. We now anticipate releasing the sound material on a single CD together with version 3.1 of ICECUP. The recordings will be compressed using the MP3 compression method. For interested researchers, we propose to make individual uncompressed recordings available on request.
As noted above, the ICE-GB Handbook will be published by John Benjamins in their series Varieties of English around the World later this year. The handbook contains chapters on ICE-GB, the ICE Grammar, ICECUP (including a chapter on the new facilities in ICECUP 3.1), a series of case studies, and a chapter on designing experiments with the parsed corpus.
Sean is seconded to the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at UCL until August 2002 for a short project with Professor Dick Hudson.
4. Staff
We regret to announce the death of two people who were closely involved with the Survey over a long period of time.
Oonagh Sayce died on 23 August 2001. After studying in the department as an undergraduate and postgraduate student she joined the Survey in the 1980s and worked on the ‘first stage analysis’ of the Quirk corpus. She was also one of the researchers responsible for compiling the manuals of the original Survey corpus. During her last few years in the Survey she was involved with the annotation of the ICE-GB corpus.
René Quinault died on 13 November 2001. He was associated with UCL since 1932 when he came here as an undergraduate student. After retiring from the BBC in 1973 he joined the Survey. After a short illness he died in hospital aged 89. A memorial event was held on Friday 1 February which was attended by René’s family, as well as a large number of his friends, and colleagues. An obituary appeared in The Independent which can be viewed online here. We will miss both Oonagh and René a great deal and are very grateful for the enormous contributions they both made to the work of the Survey over a long period of time.
5. Publications, conference presentations, talks, theses and other studies using Survey material
Please let us know if you would like us to include your publications based on SEU material. We will appreciate it if you send us offprints of any such publications.
Aarts, Bas (2001) Corpus linguistics, Chomsky and Fuzzy Tree Fragments. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 5-13.
Aarts, Bas (2001) Review of Peter Collins and David Lee (1999) (eds.) The clause in English: in honour of Rodney Huddleston. Studies in Language Companion Series. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Journal of Linguistics 37. 423-428.
Aarts, Bas (2001, with Evelien Keizer, Mariangela Spinillo and Sean Wallis) Which or what: A study of interrogative determiners in present-day English. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2001, University of Lancaster. Also presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Aarts, Bas (2001, with Sean Wallis) Modal expressions in ICE-GB: issues of retrieval. Workshop conducted at the conference Modality in contemporary English, University of Verona.
Aarts, Bas (2001) Lectures at the Universities of Sarajevo and Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Brom, Niek, Inge de Mönninck and Nelleke Oostdijk (2001) An evaluation of the MF/MD method. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Capelle, Bert (2001) Is out of always a preposition? Journal of English Linguistics 29.4., 315-328.
Chang, K. (2001) The get-passive in English: a complex predicate analysis. UCL MA thesis.
Denison, David (2001) Gradience and linguistic change. In: Laurel Brinton (ed.) Historical linguistics 1999: selected papers from the 14th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver 9-13 August 1999.119-144.
Facchinettei, Roberta (2001) The modal verb may in contemporary British English: a study of the ICE-GB corpus. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (2001) Causative cause, get, have and make: a preliminary study. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Goburdhun, Y. (2001) A comparative study of phrase structure in English, with special reference to noun phrases. UCL MA thesis.
Holmes, Janet (2001) Ladies and gentlemen: corpus analysis and linguistic sexism. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt (eds.). Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 141-156.
Kallen, Jeffrey L. and John M. Kirk (2001) Convergence and divergence in the verb phrase in Irish standard English: a corpus-based approach. In: John M. Kirk and Dónall P. Ó. Baoill (eds.) Language links: the languages of Scotland and Ireland. Belfast: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona. 59-79.
Kaltenböck, Gunther (2001). It-extraposition and non-extraposition in English discourse. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt (eds.). Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 157-176.
Keizer, Evelien (2001, with Bas Aarts, Mariangela Spinillo and Sean Wallis) Which or what: A study of interrogative determiners in present-day English. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2001, University of Lancaster.
Keizer, Evelien (2001) Sort/kind/type-of constructions. Paper presented at the Functional Grammar colloquium, University of Amsterdam.
Kirk, L. (2001) The gerund in English. UCL MA thesis.
Kohnen, Thomas (2001) Corpora and speech acts: the study of performatives. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 178-186.
Leech, Geoffrey (2001) The English modal auxiliaries 1961-1991: modality on the move. Paper presented at the conference Modality in contemporary English, University of Verona.
Lenk, Uta (2001) Stabilized expressions in spoken discourse: worth our time? In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 1187-200.
Lukoff, B. (2001) The noun+noun sequence in English. UCL MA thesis.
Lindquist, Hans (2001, with Magnus Levin) Apples and oranges: on comparing data from different corpora. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 201-213.
Mindt, Ilka (2001) Syntactic constituents in main clauses. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Mukherjee, Joybrato (2001) Form and function of parasyntactic structures: a corpus-based study of talk units in spoken English. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.
Mukherjee, Joybrato (2001) A functional corpus analysis of prosody-syntax interactions in spoken English. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Nelson, Gerald (2001) English: an essential grammar. London: Routledge.
Nelson, Gerald (2001, with Sean Wallis) Exploiting fuzzy tree fragments in the investigation of parsed corpora. Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.3. 339-361.
Nelson, Gerald (2001, with Sean Wallis) Knowledge discovery in grammatically analysed corpora. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 5. 305-335.
Oostdijk, Nelleke (2001) Disfluencies in spoken language data. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Seidlhofer, Barbara (2001) Brave new English? The European English Messenger X/1. 42-48.
Skandera, Paul (2001) Research into idioms and the International Corpus of English. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 339-353.
Smith, Nicholas (2001) Changes in the modals of strong obligation and logical necessity: must, have to and (have) got to in recent British English. Paper presented at the conference Modality in contemporary English, University of Verona.
Smith, Nicholas, and Geoffrey Leech (2001) Progress report: grammatical change in recent written English, based on the FLOB and LOB corpora. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Spinillo, Mariangela (2001, with Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis) Which or what: A study of interrogative determiners in present-day English. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2001, University of Lancaster.
Taglicht, Joseph (2001) Actually, there's more to it than meets the eye. English Language and Linguistics 5.1. 1-16.
Vine, Bernadette (2001) Getting things done: some practical issues in a functional investigation of directives in spoken extracts from the New Zealand and British components of the International Corpus of English. In: Christian Mair and Marianne Hundt. Corpus linguistics and linguistic theory. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 371-374.
Wallis, Sean (2001) Performing scientific experiments in parsed corpora with ICECUP 3.1. Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Wallis, Sean (2001) Completing parsed corpora: from correction to evolution. In: A. Abeillé (ed.). Treebanks: Building and using syntactically annotated corpora. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Avaliable online here.
Wallis, Sean (2001, with Bas Aarts) Modal expressions in ICE-GB: issues of retrieval. Workshop conducted at the conference Modality in contemporary English, University of Verona.
Wallis, Sean (2001, with Bas Aarts and Mariangela Spinillo) Which or what: A study of interrogative determiners in present-day English. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2001, University of Lancaster.
Wallis, Sean (2001, with Gerald Nelson) Knowledge discovery in grammatically analysed corpora. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery 5. 305-335.
Wallis, Sean (2001, with Gerald Nelson) Exploiting fuzzy tree fragments in the investigation of parsed corpora. Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.3. 339-361.
Wichmann, Anne (2001) Spoken parentheticals. In: K. Aijmer (ed.) A wealth of English: studies in honour of Göran Kjellmer. Gothenburg Studies in English 81. Gothenburg: The University of Gothenburg 177-193.
Wichmann, Anne (2001) Wh-questions and attitude. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics 2001, University of Lancaster.
Wichmann, Anne (2001) Studying attitudinal intonation: can corpora help? Paper presented at the 2001 ICAME conference, Catholic University of Louvain-la-Neuve.
Bas Aarts
Director
February 2002
This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by Survey Web Administrator.