Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2022
1. News
1.1 New colleagues and a goodbye!
This year we welcomed two new colleagues: Dr Guyanne Wilson and Dr Beth Malory.
Guyanne was appointed as the new Quirk Lecturer in the English Department. Her post was funded by an endowment generously left to UCL by Randolph Quirk. She has research interests in World Englishes, specifically grammatical variation, normative orientations, English in Africa and the Caribbean, World Englishes in diaspora and on social media, and corpus linguistics.
Beth joins us from Lancaster University. Her principal areas of research interests are sociolinguistics, including sociohistorical linguistics, discourse, and corpus methodologies. She is particularly interested in the impact of social agendas on language variation and change, and the means by which linguistic manifestations of such agendas can be traced and their effects ascertained. Beth has just published a new textbook with Routledge, entitled Introducing linguistics.
After many years at UCL we had to bid goodbye to Rachele De Felice. Rachele left for a new post at the Open University. We wish you all the best in your new job, Rachele!
1.2 New FutureLearn course English Grammar: All You Need to Know and Teaching English Grammar in Context
In
addition to our popular course English
Grammar for Teachers, launched last year on the FutureLearn
platform, we developed two new FutureLearn courses.
English Grammar: All You Need to Know is a six-week course taught by Bas Aarts which takes an in-depth look at the nuts and bolts of English grammar. It runs over six-weeks and is integrated with the Englicious platform, developed at the Survey. The course has already attracted over 3,000 participants from 156 countries. It discusses the following topics:
- The building blocks of English sentences: word classes, phrases and clauses
- Grammatical functions and semantic roles
- Using words and phrases to build clauses
- Talking about time: tense and aspect
- Talking about what is possible, probable and necessary: mood and modality
- How to communicate effectively: presenting information
NB.
For UK teachers, the course English
Grammar for Teachers is more suitable.
Teaching English Grammar in Context is a follow-on course for our FutureLearn course English Grammar for Teachers. It helps teachers to teach English grammar effectively and enjoyably using real texts, such as novels, poems and songs. On this five-week course, teachers will discover methods for teaching English grammar in context throughout primary and secondary education. With this approach, they can employ grammar in other aspects of their teaching for a more unified experience. This technique has also been shown to have positive impacts on students’ creative writing and analytical reading.
1.3 English Grammar Day
This
event returned in 2022, and was held at UCL’s Gustave Tuck Lecture
Theatre.
The speakers were:
- Tim Clist, teacher
- Shareen Wilkinson, teacher and educator
- Steven Dryden, British Library
- Michael Rundell, Chief Lexicographic Officer, Lexical Computing Ltd
- Michaela Mahlberg, University of Birmingham
- Bas Aarts, UCL
The day ended with a panel discussion, led by Jonnie Robinson.
In 2023 the English Grammar Day will be held on Friday 23 June at UCL. Bookings are now open.
More information and how to book
1.4 CorpusCast
Have you always wanted to know more about the Survey of English Usage? Listen to this CorpusCast episode in which Robbie Love interviews Bas Aarts on the history of the Survey and corpus linguistics.
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1.5 In memoriam: Gerry Nelson
We are extremely sad to announce the death of our friend and colleague, Gerald (Gerry) Nelson, Professor Emeritus of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who has died following a short illness on 20 October 2022. Gerry was born in 1959 in Maynooth, Ireland, and studied at Maynooth University for his BA and MA. He received his PhD in theories of linguistic form in the 18th Century from University College Dublin, and worked in public libraries until he got what he referred to as ‘his big break’ in 1991, when he joined the Survey of English Usage as a Research Fellow on a three-year ESRC grant. This was followed by a two-year Leverhulme project, during which he contributed substantially to Sidney Greenbaum’s Oxford English Grammar. Later on, he took over the reins of three further editions of Sidney’s Introduction to English Grammar.
Gerry joined an ambitious project, the International Corpus of English (ICE), which became central to his academic life. This project, initially proposed by Sidney Greenbaum in 1989, would be a multi-centre international project. Every member of the network (some 20 teams) would create a corpus according to the same strict criteria, permitting English varieties to be meaningfully compared for the first time. Although this challenge later proved difficult, data would be collected synchronically within a short time window from 1990 to 1992. Gerry and Sid updated Randolph Quirk’s Survey Corpus model of a corpus of both speech and writing, refining the design in a number of ways. There were to be more varied genres and contexts, texts would be shorter at 2,000 words each, and there were a number of practical stipulations on corpus participants, some of which were easier to apply than others! Crucially, every requirement would be applied equally to every variety of English captured by project teams – a task that proved challenging. Gerry was the principal coordinator for the British Component of ICE, ICE-GB. As well as obtaining recordings and texts, Gerry, the ex-librarian, had to obtain permission forms from a thousand participants, ranging from individuals to the BBC Copyright and Artists’ Department. Gerry took on the process of data collection and archival, and it was Gerry and Sid, with Nelleke Oostdijk and Hans van Halteren in Nijmegen, who applied the Quirk grammar to the corpus.
The two books Comparing English Worldwide (1996, edited by Greenbaum) and Exploring Natural Language (2002, authored with Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts) stand in testament to the huge contribution that Gerry made to the field of corpus annotation, and to the highly collaborative way of working that these projects represented. Following Sidney’s death in 1996, Bas Aarts took over the reins as Director of the Survey, and Chuck Meyer in Boston initially coordinated the ICE project. Gerry remained the leader of the ICE-GB component, which was completed under his stewardship in 1998, with a second release in 2006. Gerry was offered a Research Professorship at the University of Hong Kong in 2000, where he stayed for two years. In 2001, Gerry became the ICE project’s principal coordinator, a responsibility he undertook for fifteen years, finally handing over the project reins to colleagues in Zurich in 2016.
He returned to UCL as a lecturer and became the Deputy Director of the Survey in 2002. It was during his second period at UCL that he worked on the Diachronic Corpus of Present Day Spoken English (DCPSE) corpus, which was released in 2006 alongside the second release of ICE-GB. Gerry worked at the Survey until 2007, when he left to take up a Professorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
At CUHK, he left a significant legacy of research in corpus linguistics, through his work with colleagues and hundreds of undergraduate and postgraduate students. While at CUHK, Gerry organized the 37th International Computer Archive of Modern Medieval English (ICAME) conference, which was held in Hong Kong from 25-29 May, 2016. He also continued to contribute to the ICE project, attracting numerous PhD students to CUHK to conduct research under his supervision using the ICE corpus. Gerry held an Emeritus Professorship at CUHK after his retirement in 2020. Under Gerry’s stewardship, the ICE project continued to grow, despite the usual problems of funding. Gerry was the principal expert advising ICE teams around the world on their collection and annotation strategies, applying a healthy dose of humour and pragmatism to the inevitable challenges that corpus building in multiple jurisdictions by teams with limited resources inevitably represents. He was very well-known internationally, especially in the circles of scholars working on World Englishes. Gerry was looking forward to further collaborations following his retirement. He continued to have a close relationship with his English Department colleagues at CUHK and UCL, and it was a terrible shock for all of us to hear of his untimely death in October 2022.
The Guardian newspaper published an obituary for Gerry.
We have created a tribute page on our Survey of English blog where you can also leave your own tribute.
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1.6 In memoriam: Isaac Hallegua
In 2022 we also lost our dear friend Isaac (Ike) Hallegua. Isaac was a retired engineer who had lived in the United States, who worked for General Electric for much of his career, and following his retirement he returned to London. He joined the Survey in 1992 at the invitation of Sidney Greenbaum, where he helped out as a volunteer for thirty years. His was a quiet presence in the Survey which will very much be missed by all of us.
Isaac was a sharp, intelligent lay person, and an electronic engineer by training. He supported the computing side of the Survey, while being actively interested in linguistic matters. He proofread several manuals and our website. Not to be satisfied with his Survey work, he also volunteered in the UCL medical school. We will all miss you very much.
2. Research
For a full overview of research publications, presentations, etc. by members of the Survey, see section 5.
2.1 Quirk symposium 2023
On 30 June 2023 the Survey will organise a symposium at the British Academy in London in honour of the late Randolph Quirk.
The three confirmed speakers are:
- Professor Christian Mair, University of Freiburg
- Professor Emma Moore, University of Sheffield
- Dr Guyanne Wilson, University College London
Please keep an eye on our website for announcements and further details.
2.2 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 sample corpora from either DCPSE or ICE-GB, and all of our corpus users can use it. 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).
ICECUP continues to be maintained and developed. However we do not publish non-critical updates. In particular, corpus researchers need to know that their results are reliable, and do not change simply due to a software update!
2.3 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. The following research seminars took place during 2022:
- Thursday 20 October, Javier Ruano-García, Exploring the language of dialect writing
- Wednesday 7 December, Beth Malory, Using Change Point Analysis to research English variation and change
3. Teaching
3.1 Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics
Our UCL Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics ran from Monday 20 June to Wednesday 22 June 2022. We returned to a version of our traditional three-day format, but online and timed to allow everyone from Europe to Japan to attend. We had 67 attendees from all over the world, with a large group from Japan.
This year's Summer School will take place from Monday 19 to Wednesday 21 June 2023, and features our new colleague Beth! Again, it will be held online in the same time window, in order to be as inclusive as possible, due to the likelihood of ongoing restrictions on travel, and to keep costs down for participants.
More information and how to book
3.2 Englicious and Continuous Professional Development courses for schoolteachers
The Englicious project is continually being enhanced with new functionality and resources. 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
CPD
The Survey offers 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.
- 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.
English Grammar for Teachers is now also available on the FutureLearn platform, as described above.
The Survey also offers bespoke courses for teachers in schools (INSET courses). For more information, email the Survey.
More information, and how to book
3.3 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.
4. Social media
The Survey has three blogs:
- Bas Aarts’s Grammarianism blog.
- Sean Wallis’s corp.ling.stats blog.
- And the Survey blog.
You can follow us on Twitter via @UCLEnglishUsage and @EngliciousUCL.
5. 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. (2022) ‘Attributive ing-participles: adjectives or verb?’ Presentation at the workshop Current approaches to morphosyntax at the interfaces, University of Oviedo, Spain.
Aarts, B. (2022) ‘Participles and so-called synthetic compounds as attributive noun modifiers in English.’ Presentation at the conference Grammar and Corpora, University of Gent, Belgium.
Aarts, B. (2022) ‘Preterites as past participles.’ Plenary lecture at the 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE9), University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Aarts, B. (2022) ‘Designing a learner-centred syllabus: innovative practices in teaching English for specific purposes,’ University of Biskra, Algeria. [Presented online]
Aijmer, K. (2022) ‘“Well he’s sick anyway like”: anyway in Irish English,’ Corpus Pragmatics doi:10.1007/s41701-022-00121-y
Allan, K. (2022) ‘Degrees of Lexicalization'in the history of English: antonymy and asymmetry.’ Plenary lecture at the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Oxford.
Fernández-Pena, Y., J. Pérez-Guerra (2022) ‘Non-formulaic highly/partially conventionalised fragments in written english: a corpus-driven taxonomy.’ Paper presented at the 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE9), University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Gries, S. (2022) ‘Most dispersion measures do not measure dispersion.’ Paper presented at the 43rd Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English, Cambridge, UK.
Nykiel, J. and N. Põldvere (2022) ‘Ellipsis in a less well known environment: the reactive what-x construction in English.’ Paper presented at the 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE9), University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Olayinka Unuabonah, F. and F. Oyebola (2022) ‘“He’s a lawyer you know and all of that”: general extenders in Nigerian English.’ English World-Wide.
Põldvere, N, R. De Felice, R. and C. Paradis (2022) (eds.) Advice in conversation: corpus pragmatics meets mixed methods. (Elements in Pragmatics). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schneider, G. (2022) ‘Comparing corpus-driven and corpus-based approaches to diachronic variation: grammatical changes in Late Modern and Present-Day English.’ In: O. Schützler and J. Schlüter (eds.) Data and methods in Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 291-320.
Schultze-Berndt, E. (2022) ‘When subjects frame the clause: discontinuous noun phrases as an iconic strategy for marking thetic constructions.’ Linguistics 60:3. doi:10.1515/ling-2020-0138
Seitanidi, E., N. Põldvere and C. Paradis (2022) ‘The focalizing all-cleft construction in the London–Lund corpora of spoken British English.’ Paper presented at the 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE9), University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Shakir, M. (2022) ‘Compiling a corpus of South Asian online Englishes: some reflections and a pilot study.’ Paper presented at the 43rd Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English, Cambridge, UK.
Vetter, F. (2022) ‘Comparing approaches to (sub-) register variation: the ‘press editorials’ sections in the British, Canadian and Jamaican components of ICE.’ In: O. Schützler and J. Schlüter (eds.) Data and methods in Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 75-100.
Wallis, S.A. and S. Mehl (2022) ‘Comparing baselines for corpus analysis: research into the get-passive in speech and writing.’ In: O. Schützler and J. Schlüter (eds.) Data and methods in Corpus Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 101-125.
Wallis, S.A. (2022) ‘Accurate confidence intervals on binomial proportions, functions of proportions and related scores.’ Paper presented at the 43rd Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English, Cambridge, UK. » corp.ling.stats
Wallis, S.A. (2002) ‘Thinking in quantities: what can corpus experiments tell us about language?’ Presentation at the PhD Winter School in Digital Humanities, University of Verona, Italy.
Wallis, S.A. (2002) ‘An introduction to statistics: what every researcher needs to know.’ Presentation at the PhD Winter School in Digital Humanities, University of Verona, Italy.
Bas Aarts
Director
January 2023
This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by Survey Web Administrator.