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The Survey of English Usage, based in UCL's English department, is an internationally renowned resource for the study of present day English and a world leader in corpus linguistics.
The Survey of English Usage was founded in 1959 by Randolph Quirk. It carries out research in English language corpus linguistics. It was the first centre in Europe to undertake this type of research. Many well-known linguists have spent time doing research at the Survey.
The Survey collects samples of naturally-occurring language for the purposes of description and analysis.
About corpus linguistics
Corpus linguistics is the study of naturally-occurring language structure and use by:
- collecting samples of spoken or written language
- analysing these samples
About our projects
The first corpus projects were completed before cheap computer power and mass storage. The original Survey corpus was first recorded on reel-to-reel Revox tape recorders, transcribed by hand, and then typed up, stored and annotated on paper cards.
Modern desktop computing has changed this approach. Our recent major corpus projects, including the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE) were digitised, transcribed, annotated and indexed on computers.
We also develop software to help us undertake this work. The range of possible annotation has grown in sophistication partly as a result of this.
A major theme in our current research is how to use computerised corpora for linguistic purposes.
Our events
We run events including seminars and summer schools. Our summer schools in English corpus linguistics are for language and linguistics students and teachers of English.
We have held the annual English Grammar Day with other organisations. We discuss the role of grammar in the English language curriculum at this event.
Learn more about our work
Find out more about the Survey on our website. This includes:
- our current projects
- research outputs such as reference material
- downloadable software
- our events