The Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 1999

1. General

In last year's Annual Report we reported the completion of the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). We are pleased that there is enormous interest in ICE-GB from all over the world, and we are steadily distributing copies of the corpus, together with its dedicated exploration software ICECUP. For those of you who haven't seen yet what you can do with ICE-GB, a free download of the ICECUP software is available on the Survey's website, together with some 20,000 words of text.

Version 3.1 of ICE-GB is currently being prepared. It will feature more versatile Fuzzy Tree Fragments, an improved Wizard, and new facilities for concordancing with FTFs. It will also allow for the synchronised playback of digitized speech. This will enable users to listen to the original recordings on CD, follow the transcribed text, and see the full grammatical tree analysis of the sentence at the same time. We anticipate that the audio CDs will be available by the end of 2000.

We are grateful to the many colleagues who have sent us feedback regarding their experiences in using the corpus software. Their comments have been invaluable in preparing the ICE-GB Handbook which will appear in the course of 2000 under the title Exploring natural language: the British component of the International Corpus of English (Varieties of English Around the World, Amsterdam: John Benjamins). Although it is early days yet, the number of conference papers and articles based on ICE-GB is steadily increasing. See below. We will greatly appreciate it if you send us offprints of published work using ICE-GB.

New ICE Corpora

Please note that ICE-East Africa and ICE-New Zealand are now also available on CD-ROM. Here are the relevant websites and contacts:

East Africa New Zealand

IGE

The Internet Grammar of English (IGE), a freely accessible grammar on the Web (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/) is now enjoying between 150 and 200 hits a day from some 124 countries. The IGE is also available on CD-ROM, which a number of universities have purchased for use over a network.


2. Research

The Survey is pleased to announce funding for two new research grants.

Gerry Nelson was awarded a prestigious Fellowship by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC R000271083) for a project entitled Subordination in Spoken and Written English: A Corpus-based Study. This study aims to examine differences between speech and writing in terms of subordination. The methodology involves applying a number of measures of syntactic complexity to the spoken and written samples in the parsed ICE-GB corpus. For further details of the project, see the following website:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/subord/index.htm

We were also awarded a British Academy grant (SG-AN25308/APN28749) for completing the ICE Handbook, which will appear in 2000 (see section 1 above). The Handbook will act as a manual for the corpus and its exploration software. In addition, it will present a number of case studies demonstrating how the corpus can be used by researchers.


3. Announcement

Grammar and Lexis

The Survey is organising a oneday symposium to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Survey of English Usage on Friday 21 July 2000.

The Survey of English Usage was founded in 1959 by Randolph Quirk as a research unit for the study of both written and spoken educated English, by means of corpus work and psycholinguistic inquiry. The Survey Corpus was one of the world's first English language corpora. Many books and articles have been based on Survey material, principal among them The Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) and A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), both by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik. In the early 1990s a second corpus was compiled: the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). This fully tagged and parsed corpus was recently released on CDROM, together with dedicated search software.

The symposium celebrates forty years of English language research at the Survey by addressing two intertwined themes Grammar and Lexis reflecting the interests of the founder of the Survey. Speakers include Randolph Quirk, Geoffrey Leech, David Crystal, Noël Burton-Roberts, Katie Wales and Frank Palmer. Each will address one of these themes in relation to empirical linguistics. We expect that there will be 8 speakers in total on the day, with a reception at the end.

For the most up-to-date information on this event, see:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/archives/grammarandlexis.htm

The symposium is organised in collaboration with the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London.

For more information, please contact:

Institute of English Studies
Senate House
University of London

Tel: +44 (0)20 7862 8675
Fax: +44 (0)20 7862 8672
email: ies@sas.ac.uk.

4. Staff

Marie Gibney continues as the Survey's administrator. We are grateful to her for all her hard work, done in much less time, given that she is now working for only two and a half days a week.

Isaac Hallegua works on systems and data management. He frequently flies to the United States as a consultant for his former employer General Electric.

Gerry Nelson travelled to Hong Kong for a series of workshops on the International Corpus of English, and advised the ICE-HK team. We congratulate him on his promotion to Senior Research Fellow, and on being awarded an ESRC research grant (one of only eleven in the UK!). He's also working on the ICE-GB Handbook.

René Quinault has been working on the splitting of the ICE-GB soundfiles in line with the sentence numbering. He has also looked after the Survey book and offprint library, and has catered for the needs of visitors. He has transferred the old Survey corpus (the "Quirk corpus") to CD-ROM.

Sean Wallis gave papers in Paris and Freiburg on the ICE project (details below), and is working on the next release of ICECUP as well as on the ICE-GB Handbook.

5. Publications, conference presentations, and studies using Survey material

Aarts, Bas (1999) (with Sean Wallis and Gerald Nelson) Parsing in reverse: exploring ICE-GB with Fuzzy Tree Fragments and ICECUP. In: John M. Kirk (1999)(ed.) Corpora galore: analyses and techniques in describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 335-343.

Aarts, Bas (1999) (with Gerald Nelson and Justin Buckley) Online resources for grammar teaching and learning: the Internet grammar of English. In: Rebecca S. Wheeler (1999)(ed.) Language alive in the classroom. New York: Praeger. 199-212.

Aarts, Bas (1999) (with Gerald Nelson) Investigating English around the world: The International Corpus of English. 1999. In: Rebecca S. Wheeler (1999)(ed.) The workings of language. New York: Praeger. 107-115.

Aarts, Bas (1999) Seminar and lecture series at the University of Zürich, Switzerland.

Aarts, Bas (1999) Seminar on corpus construction. Methodology Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London.

Aarts, Bas (1999) Chomsky, corpus linguistics and Fuzzy Tree Fragments. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Aarts, Bas (1999) Language theory, corpora and the internet: sources of innovation in language teaching. Plenary lecture at the Fifth Lateum Conference, Moscow State University, Russia.

Aarts, Bas (1999) Corpus exploitation strategies. Paper read at the Text Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of Oslo.

Aarts, Bas (1999) Biography of Sidney Greenbaum. In: Bernard Spolsky (1999)(ed.) The International Encyclopedia of Educational Linguistics, Oxford: Pergamon. 189.

Antoniou, Machi (1999) Phrasal and prepositional verbs: a discussion of some recent syntactic analyses. Dissertation, English Department UCL.

Bald, Wolf-Dietrich (1999) Unless. In: Uwe Carls and Peter Lucko (1999)(eds) Form, function and variation in English. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. 333-342.

Bald, Wolf-Dietrich (1999) Which one: linguistic category and context. In: H. Antor and K.L. Cope (1999)(eds) Intercultural encounters: studies in English literatures. Essays presented to Rüdiger Ahrens on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. Heidelberg: Winter. 83-92.

Denison, David (1999) Gradience and linguistics change. Plenary lecture at the International Conference in Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, Canada.

Greenbaum, Sidney (1999) (with Gerald Nelson) Elliptical clauses in spoken and written English. In: Peter Collins and David Lee (1999)(eds) The clause in English: in honour of Rodney Huddleston (Studies in Language Companion Series). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 111-126.

Hagen Engen, Janne (1999) Aspects of mixed coordination. Dissertation, English Department UCL.

Holmes, Janet (1999) Ladies and gentlemen: corpus analysis and linguistic sexism. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Kaltenböck, Gunther (1999) It-extraposition and non-extraposition in English discourse. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Kaltenböck, Gunther (1999) Which is it? Some remarks on anticipatory it. Vienna English Working Papers 8.2. 48-71.

Lavelle, Thomas (1999) AP data as evidence for constructions. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Meyer, Charles F. (1999) Pseudo-titles in the press genre of various components of the International Corpus of English. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Mönninck, Inge de (1999) On the move: the mobility of constituents in the English Noun Phrase: a multi-method approach. Language and Computers. (Studies in Practical Linguistics) Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Nelson, Gerald (1999) (with Bas Aarts and Justin Buckley) Online resources for grammar teaching and learning: the Internet grammar of English. In: Rebecca S. Wheeler (1999)(ed.) Language alive in the classroom. New York: Praeger. 199-212.

Nelson, Gerald (1999) (with Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts) Parsing in reverse: exploring ICE-GB with Fuzzy Tree Fragments and ICECUP. In: John M. Kirk (1999)(ed.) Corpora galore: analyses and techniques in describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 335-343.

Nelson, Gerald (1999) (with Bas Aarts) Investigating English around the world: The International Corpus of English. 1999. In: Rebecca S. Wheeler (1999)(ed.) The workings of language. New York: Praeger. 107-115.

Nelson, Gerald (1999) (with S. Greenbaum) Elliptical clauses in spoken and written English. In: Peter Collins and David Lee (1999)(eds) The clause in English: in honour of Rodney Huddleston (Studies in Language Companion Series). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 111-126.

Nelson, Gerald (1999) Review of Magnus Ljung (ed.) (1997) Corpusbased studies in English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. ICAME Journal 23, 156159.

Nelson (1999) Visiting consultant and lecturer. Hong Kong University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Skandera, Paul (1999) Research into idioms and the International Corpus of English. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Spinillo, Mariangela (1999) Determiners: a class to be got rid of? Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Vine, Bernadette (1999) Getting things done in the New Zealand and British components of the International Corpus of English. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Wallis, Sean (1999) (with Bas Aarts and Gerald Nelson) Parsing in reverse: exploring ICE-GB with Fuzzy Tree Fragments and ICECUP. In: John M. Kirk (1999)(ed.) Corpora galore: analyses and techniques in describing English. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 335-343.

Wallis, Sean (1999) Further developments in ICECUP. Paper read at the 20th ICAME conference, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, Germany.

Wallis, Sean (1999) Completing parsed corpora. Paper delivered at the Treebanks workshop, Paris 1819 June 1999.

Wallis, Sean (1999) Completing parsed corpora: from correction to evolution. In Anne Abeillé (ed.) Journées ATALA sur les corpus annotés pour la syntaxe. Paris: ATALA. 712.

Zamarioni, Daniela (1999) A study of sentence adverbials in present-day English. Dissertation, English Department UCL.


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.

For the most up-to-date information about the Survey of English Usage, including the availability of forthcoming software, please check our website. The URL is: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/.


Bas Aarts
Director

February 2000

This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by Survey Web Administrator.