The Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2000

1. General

During the summer the Survey celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a one-day symposium under the title Grammar and Lexis, reflecting the interests of its founder, Randolph Quirk. The speakers were Randolph Quirk, Geoffrey Leech, Frank Palmer, Noël Burton-Roberts, Liliane Haegeman, Katie Wales, Robert Ilson and Bas Aarts. The lively programme (details still available at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/archives) attracted a large number of participants both from Britain and abroad. The day ended with a reception for the participants.

Together with Susan Mandala of Royal Holloway College (now at the University of Sunderland) the Survey organised a seminar series under the title Corpora and Conversation. The series attracted researchers from London, Reading, Cambridge and Leeds to discuss new developments in corpus annotation. Speakers included Susan Mandala (University of Sunderland), Tony McEnery (University of Lancaster), Anne Wichmann (University of Central Lancashire), Jenny Thomas (University of Wales, Bangor) and Bas Aarts, Gerry Nelson and Sean Wallis (Survey of English Usage, University College London). (The full programme can still be viewed at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/archives/corpconvers.htm.) We welcome Dr. Evelien Keizer as a new Research Fellow to the Survey. She will be working on the AHRB Noun Phrase project (see below). We also welcome Gabriel Ozón, a new PhD student from Argentina, who will be working on ditransitive constructions.

2. New lectureship in the UCL English Department

The Department of English Language and Literature at UCL will soon be advertising a new post at the Lecturer B level for a specialist in Modern English Language. The preferred candidate will be a syntactician with a PhD in English Linguistics, and will have teaching and research experience. Experience in teaching literature-related subjects will be an advantage. If you are interested in this post, or know someone who might be, please keep an eye on the Times Higher Education Supplement, and the language/linguistics discussion lists.

3. Research

New Projects

The Survey was awarded new funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board to carry out a major new research project entitled The English Noun Phrase: an empirical study. The project’s aims are to carry out a large scale study of the English Noun Phrase (NP), using the recently completed British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) as a database. The overall research objective will be to produce a comprehensive typology of English NPs which will be published in a monograph, and in a searchable form on the project website. The researcher working on this project is Dr. Evelien Keizer, who joined us from Tilburg University (see ‘Staff’ below). For further details, see: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/noun-phrase/index.htm.

ICE-GB

Sean Wallis has been working on improvements to his ICECUP software, which the Survey plans to release in mid 2001. As well as playback of recorded speech (see below), ICECUP 3.1 will include a complete and integrated lexicon of ICE-GB, which contains all the words in the corpus organised according to a variety of grammatical and lexical criteria, e.g. part of speech tags. It also displays occurrence statistics. Further new features of ICECUP 3.1 include a powerful text wildcard facility and the option of inserting logical expressions inside Fuzzy Tree Fragments, so that users can specify, for example, that they want a tree structure containing a verb that is not interrogative. There are also a number of enhancements to the process of exploring the results of searches, including a new way of elaborating grammatical concordances.

As well as working on ICECUP, Sean has spent some time encouraging researchers to use it to perform their own experiments. He has also constructed a new ‘FTF home’ web site (co-written with Gerry Nelson) aimed at linguists using ICE-GB, which discusses FTFs and some of the experimental issues facing researchers when they try to interpret their results. This site is at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english usage/resources/ftfs.

We are pleased to report the publication of two research papers relating to this work, written by Sean Wallis and Gerry Nelson: the first, on the computational background to ICECUP, was published in Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.3. (see section 6 below for details). The second, which describes a successful pilot experiment in performing automatic knowledge discovery on the ICE-GB corpus, will be published in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery in 2001.

The ICE-GB Handbook, entitled Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English by Gerald Nelson, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts is nearly finished, and will be published by John Benjamins in their series Varieties of English around the World later this year.

Many people have been asking about the sound recordings of the ICE-GB spoken texts. Our current plan is to release the entire set on a single CD, ideally with ICE-GB and ICECUP 3.1. The recordings will be compressed using the MP3 compression method. Please note that, whereas ICECUP will run without problems on PCs with an old 386 processor and Windows 3.1, the decoding of MP3 sound files requires at least a Pentium PC. The advantage is that users will not need to swap CDs when listening to any sound files. For researchers interested in the optimum quality, we propose to make individual uncompressed recordings available on request.

4. Web developments

The Survey recently published on the web a full Bibliography of studies that have used material from our two corpora: the ‘Quirk corpus’ and the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB). Please let us know if you would like us to include your work on this website. The URL is: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/archives/seu biblio.htm.

We have also put up on the web a list of theses (both MA and PhD) written by former students taking degrees in English language and linguistics. The web address is: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/archives/theses.htm.

See also our new FTF website, mentioned above: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/resources/ftfs.

5. Staff

Bas Aarts gave a paper at the Survey symposium Grammar and Lexis, at the Corpora and Conversation seminar, as well as at the conference Linguistics and the English Language held at the Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, France. During the spring he was a visiting professor at the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

Marie Gibney continues as part-time Administrator of the Survey.

Isaac Hallegua works on systems and data management, and manages the Survey’s data backup system.

Evelien Keizer joined the Survey in January 2001 to work on the new Noun Phrase project (see above). She graduated from the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) in 1987, with a PhD from the same University in 1992 (entitled Reference, predication and (in)definiteness in Functional Grammar: a functional approach to English copular sentences). She worked as a lecturer at the VU from 1991 until 1994. Most recently she worked on Noun Phrases as a Postdoctoral researcher on the programme A Modern Grammar of Dutch at Tilburg University.

Gerry Nelson obtained a post as Research Professor in Hong Kong, where he is working on the HK component of the ICE-project. We are very sad to lose him, but wish him lots of luck in his new position. He is still involved in the publication of the ICE-GB Handbook (see above).

René Quinault has been working on the digitisation of the old Survey Corpus (the ‘Quirk corpus’) soundfiles which we hope to make available soon. The corpus is being transferred to CD-ROM. He has also looked after the Survey book and offprint library, and has catered for the needs of visitors.

Sean Wallis is working on version 3.1 of ICECUP (see above for a description of developments). He gave talks at the Universities of Lancaster and Tübingen, Germany, as well as at the ICAME conference in Sydney, Australia and at the VIEW (Variation Is EveryWhere) sociolinguistics conference held at the University of Essex.


6. 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 (2000) (with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis) Global resources for a global language: English language pedagogy in the modern age. In: Claus Gnutzmann (1999)(ed.) English as a Global Language: native and nonnative perspectives. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. 267-284.

Aarts, Bas (2000) (with Martin W. Bauer) Corpus construction: a principle for qualitative data collection. In: Martin W. Bauer and George Gaskell (eds.) Qualitative researching: with text image and sound. London: Sage. 3-37.

Aarts, Bas (2000) (with Sean Wallis) Exploration and discovery in corpora: ICECUP and beyond. Paper presented by Sean Wallis at ICAME Australia.

Aarts, Bas (2000) (with Sean Wallis) Using ICECUP for natural language exploration: a demonstration. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Aarts, Bas (2000) Subsective and intersective gradience. Paper presented at the conference Linguistics and the English Language. Université de Toulouse Le Mirail, France.

Aarts, Bas (2000) Visiting lecturer, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Aarts, Bas (2000) (with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis) Annotation systems. Paper presented at the seminar series Corpora and Conversation, Institute of English Studies, University of London.

Berg, Thomas (2000) The position of adjectives on the noun-verb continuum. English Language and Linguistics 4.2. 269-293.

Breivik, Leiv Egil (2000) On relative clauses and locative expressions in English existential sentences. Views 9.1, 6-28.

Burton Roberts, Noël (2000) Realisation vs. representation in the treatment of case and agreement. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Chu, S. Y. S. (2000) How far is prototype theory necessary in grammatical descriptions? A study focussing on English noun phrases. Master’s dissertation, UCL English Department.

Crystal, David (2000) The future of global English grammatical identity. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Denison, David (2000) Gradience in current change in the English Noun Phrase. Paper read at the 11th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Depraetere, Ilse and Susan Reed (2000) The present progressive: constraints on its use with numerical object NPs. English Language and Linguistics 4.1, 97-114.

Declerck, Renaat and Susan Reed (2000) The semantics and pragmatics of unless. English Language and Linguistics 4.2, 205-241.

Facchinetti, Roberta (2000) From teens to twenties: the use of modal verbs by British English young speakers. Paper presented at ICAME Australia.

Guo, Qing (2000) Ditransitive complementation in present-day British English. Master’s dissertation, UCL English Department.

Haegeman, Liliane (2000) On the subject of Bridget Jones. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Ilson, Robert (2000) Tough calls: making a useful corpus; making a corpus useful. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Lavelle, Thomas (2000) Form, interpretation and constraint: studies of English nominalisations and related constructions. Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis XCII. Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell International.

Lavelle, Thomas (2000) Corpora, construction grammar and regional variation: modal adjective phrases in international varieties of English. Paper presented at ICAME Australia.

Leech, Geoffrey (2000) Diachronic linguistics across a generation gap: from the 1960s to the 1990s. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Meunier, Fanny (2000) Analysing a parsed corpus of advanced EFL learner writing: pedagogical implications for grammar teaching. Paper read at TALC 2000, Graz, Austria.

Meunier, Fanny (2000) A computer corpus linguistics approach to interlanguage: noun phrase complexity in advanced learner writing. PhD thesis, University of Louvain-la-Neuve.

Nelson, Gerald (2000) Review of Kennedy, Graeme (1998) An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics. London: Longman. Journal of English Linguistics 28.2, 193 6.

Nelson, Gerald (2000) (with Bas Aarts and Sean Wallis) Global resources for a global language: English language pedagogy in the modern age. In: Claus Gnutzmann (1999)(ed.) English as a Global Language: native and nonnative perspectives. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. 267-284.

Nelson, Gerald (2000, with Sean Wallis) Exploiting fuzzy tree fragment queries in the investigation of parsed corpora. Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.3, 339-361.

Oostdijk, Nelleke (2000) Corpus-based English linguistics at a cross roads. English Studies 81.2. 127-141.

Ozón, Gabriel (2000) Ditransitives: a corpus study. Master’s dissertation, UCL English Department.

Palmer, Frank (2000) Negation and the modal verbs in English. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Quirk, Randolph (2000) Getting their clause into English: some problems of language spread. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Spinillo, Mariangela (2000) On the structure of multispecified Noun Phrases. Paper presented at the conference Linguistics and the English Language. Université de Toulouse Le Mirail.

Spinillo, Mariangela (2000) Determiners: a class to be got rid of? Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik. 25.2, 173-189.

Spinillo, Mariangela (2000) Word classes: how many do we really need? Paper presented at the IATEFL conference, Edinburgh.

Striedner, M. (2000) Is there still a case for apostrophe " ’s"? Master’s dissertation, UCL English Department.

Toro, M. (2000) The use of language as a means of face-saving in a second language teaching context. A comparative study of English and Spanish courses. Master’s dissertation, UCL English Department.

Wales, Katie (2000) Quirks, quizzes and questionnaires. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Wallis, Sean (2000) (with Bas Aarts and Gerald Nelson) Global resources for a global language: English language pedagogy in the modern age. In: Claus Gnutzmann (1999)(ed.) English as a Global Language: native and nonnative perspectives. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag. 267-284.

Wallis, Sean (2000, with Gerald Nelson) Exploiting fuzzy tree fragment queries in the investigation of parsed corpora. Literary and Linguistic Computing 15.3, 339-361.

Wallis, Sean (2000) (with Bas Aarts) Exploration and discovery in corpora: ICECUP and beyond. Paper presented at ICAME Australia.

Wallis, Sean (2000) Using ICE GB for sociolinguistic research. Paper presented at the VIEW 2000 (Variation Is EveryWhere) conference, University of Essex.

Wallis, Sean (2000) Performing research with ICE-GB and ICECUP. Paper presented at UCREL, University of Lancaster.

Wallis, Sean (2000) Exploring parsed corpora. Paper presented at the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Wichmann, Anne (2000) Discourse, Prosody and Spoken Corpora. Paper presented at the symposium Grammar and Lexis to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Survey of English Usage.

Wichmann, Anne (2000) Investigating the intonation of interpolation in the ICE-GB corpus. Paper presented at ICAME Australia.


Bas Aarts
Director

February 2001

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