Survey of English Usage
Annual Report 2016
1. News
1.1
Englicious
Englicious is a free web resource designed as a practical teaching and learning platform for primary and secondary schools with an emphasis on the grammar of English.
Englicious makes available to pupils and teachers a wide variety of innovative teaching materials, including lesson plans, interactive exercises, projects, glossaries, etc., as well as background materials for teachers to improve their understanding of English grammar, e.g. videos. The example sentences used on the site are sourced from the Survey’s corpora. Englicious helps pupils and teachers to prepare for the UK Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling tests (colloquially known as the SPAG test) in Year 2 and Year 6. It will also help secondary school pupils to prepare for their GCSEs, in which there is a new emphasis on the correct use of grammar, spelling and punctuation. The site features a detailed and informative grammar overview, an extensive glossary and Continuous Professional Development materials for teachers. To date almost 4,000 teachers have signed up to use the site.
The Englicious project is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UCL, which enabled us to employ a part-time colleague on the project. Dr Ellen Smith-Dennis worked with us during the 2015-2016 session. She has now taken up a post at the University of Warwick.
Joining us as a Teaching Fellow in English Linguistics at UCL in 2017 is Ian Cushing. Before joining UCL, he taught English in secondary schools for six years. He is also conducting doctoral research, where he is investigating contextualised grammar and integrated language-literature teaching in Key Stage 3 English. He has published a number of books, chapters and articles related to educational linguistics and stylistics, and delivers regular workshops and talks to teachers about applying linguistics in the classroom.
You may be interested in watching a series of videos on English grammar that the project has produced. They are available on the Englicious YouTube Channel.
You can also follow Englicious on Twitter
and Facebook.
1.2 Continuous Professional Development
As noted above, the Survey has begun offering Professional Development courses on the National Curriculum Grammar requirements for teachers in UK primary and secondary schools.
English Grammar for Teachers
Teaching English Grammar in Context
We also offer ‘Inset Teaching’ where we provide training to teachers in schools. For more information, email the Survey.
1.3 English Grammar Day 2016
Together with the University of Oxford and Jonnie Robinson of the British Library, the Survey organised the third English Grammar Day on Monday 27 June 2016 at the British Library. Speakers for 2016 were author, broadcaster, and Professor of Children’s literature Michael Rosen; language specialists Bas Aarts, Ellen Smith-Dennis, Debbie Cameron and Simon Horobin; secondary school teacher Ian Cushing and the British Library’s Spoken English curator Jonnie Robinson. The panel was chaired by Marcello Giovanelli.
For a brief video impression of the day, see below.
The next English Grammar Day will be held on Monday 3 July 2017
at the British Library. Speakers for 2017 are Times journalist,
Oliver Kamm; language specialists Geoffrey Pullum, Devyani Sharma,
Marcello Giovanelli and Lucy Dipper; and secondary school teacher
Eleanor Trafford. Public participation is encouraged in a Panel
chaired by UCL English Professor John Mullan. The programme will
appear in due course on the British Library’s Events page.
1.4 Bloomsbury Festival 2016
The Survey team (including Phd students, former MA students, and our teaching fellows) participated in UCL’s Bloomsbury Festival on October 22 with a stand called ‘You’re a linguist and you don’t know it’.
We engaged with over 250 people on the day, from children to older visitors, involving them in a range of activities from interactive grammar games on Englicious to ‘guess the source language’ and ‘make your own blends’. We also distributed more than a hundred activity sheets, and our ‘star linguist’ stickers proved very popular too!
2. Research
2.1 ICECUP 3.1.1
We
have been using the latest version of our state-of-the-art corpus
research software, ICECUP, for over a year. The program’s author,
Sean Wallis, explains that the software
had to be rebuilt from the ground up for compatibility with recent
versions of Windows, and he has taken the opportunity to extend
the power of the FTF search tool. A full release is in the works.
This release is compatible with versions of Windows from XP to 10 and is fully 64-bit compatible. It contains a number of additional enhancements over ICECUP 3.1 which are documented on our website and in the help file.
As a service to the Corpus Linguistics research community, the software is available as a download 'release candidate' from here. This means that if you have already got a licence for ICE-GB R2 or DCPSE you can upgrade to the latest version of the software from our website for free.
2.2 Blogs
Bas Aarts has begun a new blog on English grammar aimed at teachers in UK primary and secondary schools. It is called GRAMMARIANISM and is linked to the Englicious website.
Sean Wallis continues to publish articles, discussion pieces and teaching material on the subject of statistics for corpus linguistics at corp.ling.stats.
We are also in the process of launching a Survey blog (more soon).
2.3 Survey research seminars
The following seminars took place during 2016:
- Thursday 3rd March: Simon Horobin (University of Oxford) ‘No gentleman goes on a bus’: H.C. Wyld and the historical study of English.
- Wednesday 16th March: Nele Pöldvere (University of Lund) ‘I think you're clearly wrong’: A corpus-based and experimental study of dialogic engagement in spoken discourse.
- Thursday 1st December: Kate Wild (Oxford English Dictionary) Grammatical description in the Oxford English Dictionary.
- Wednesday 7th December: Peter Patrick (University of Essex) Number-marking in Jamaican Patwa.
For the 2017 seminars, see our website.
2.4 Research publications and presentations
For an overview of research publications, presentations, etc. by members of the Survey, see section 4.
3. Teaching
3.1 Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics
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The Summer School in English Corpus Linguistics was held for the fourth time from 6-8 July 2016. We are pleased to say we were at full capacity. Students from all over the world took part in our concentrated three-day graduate course in corpus linguistics.
The 2017 Summer School will take place from 5-7 July.
For details, see here.
3.2 MA in English Lingustics
Our MA program in English Lingustics (with pathways in English Corpus Linguistics and English in Use) continues to attract 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.
For more information, see this
prospectus.
4 Future events
4.1 ISLE 2018
It is still well over a year away, but we thought we would already alert you to the fact that the fifth bi-annual conference of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE-5; www.isle-linguistics.org) will take place from Tuesday 17 July – Friday 20 July at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1.
We will announce the event on linguistics-related lists and on our website.
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, B. (2016) ‘Englicious: presenting a new platform for English grammar teaching’. Paper presented at the Third International Conference on Language, Literature and Society, Bangkok, Thailand, 18-19 January 2016.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Englicious: using corpus resources in English grammar teaching around the world’. Paper presented at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Englicious: using corpus resources in English grammar teaching’. Paper for the Committee for Linguistics in Education (CLIE) of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. London.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Englicious: using corpus resources in English grammar teaching’. Paper presented at Sheffield University.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Grammar for schools: pitfalls and politics’. Paper presented at the symposium ‘Doing Public Linguistics’. Sussex University, June 2016.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Englicious: presenting a new platform for English grammar teaching, using corpus resources’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2016.
Aarts, B. and E. Smith-Dennis (2016) ‘Grammar’s not grim! How to teach it in a fun and engaging way’. Paper presented at the third English Grammar Day, British Library, London.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Corpus linguistics and the teaching of English grammar’. Plenary lecture presented at the 40th meeting of the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Aarts, B. (2016) ‘Linguistic (un)certainties’. Paper presented in the English Department, University of Düsseldorf, Germany.
Allan, K. (2016) ‘A dull paper: an example of proportional analogy in semantic change?’ Paper presented at Diachrone Linguistik und anglistische Mediävistik Oberseminar, Ludwig Maximilans University, Munich, June 2016.
Allan, K. (2016) ‘Borrowing and polysemy in Early Modern English’. Paper presented at the International Association of University Professors of English Triennial Conference, London, July 2016.
Allan, K. (2016) ‘Degrees of lexicalization in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary’. Paper presented at the 19th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, University of Duisberg-Essen, August 2016.
Allan, K. (2016) ‘Degrees of lexicalization in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary’. Invited paper presented at Postgraduate Research Group Seminar, Queen Mary University London, November 2016.
Auer, A., V. González-Díaz, J. Hodson and V. Sotirova (2016)(eds.) Linguistics and Literary History. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bernaisch, T. and S. Götz (2016) ‘Tracing stylistic variation in ENL, ESL and EFL: a corpus-based study on nominal and verbal styles of first-, second- and foreign-language users’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Bowie, J. and S.A. Wallis (2016). ‘The to-infinitival perfect: a study of decline’. In: V. Werner, E. Seoane and C. Suárez-Gómez (2010)(eds), 43-94.
Collins, P. (2016) ‘Colloquialisation in contemporary Australian English’ Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Corrigan, K. and A. Mearns (2016)(eds.) Creating and digitizing language corpora. Volume 3: Databases for Public Engagement. Palgrave, Basingstoke.
Crystal, D. (2016) ‘Who would of thought it? The English language 1966-2066’. Lecture delivered at the Annual International IATEFL Conference & Exhibition, Birmingham. http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2016/session/plenary-david-crystal
De Felice, R. (2016) ‘What can corpus pragmatics tell us about language?’ Paper at the English Studies Department, University of Lund, Sweden.
De Felice, R. (2016) ‘The politics of please in British and American English: a corpus pragmatics approach’. Paper at the Department of English, Uppsala University, Sweden.
De Felice, R. (2016) ‘The Hillary emails: a new dataset for corpus linguistics?’ Paper presented at the 8th IVACS (Inter-Varietal Applied Corpus Studies) Conference, Bath.
De Felice, R. (2016) ‘Language at work - Hillary Clinton’s emails’. Paper at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Gender and Feminism Network Seminar, UCL, London.
De Felice, R. (2016) ‘The Hillary Clinton emails: corpus linguistics meets the real world’. Paper preseted at Corpus Linguistics in the South 13, Ipswich.
Deshors, S. and A. Edwards (2016) ‘Americans dreaming, Indians enclosing, Dutch wondering: a correspondence analysis of the progressive across genres and Englishes’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Durkin, P. and K. Allan (2016) ‘Borrowing and copy’. A. Auer, V. González-Díaz, J. Hodson and V. Sotirova (2016)(eds.), 71-86.
García Castro, L. (2016) ‘Variation in verbal complementation patterns in nativised varieties of English: the case of remember in Indian English’. Paper presented at the 40th meeting of the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Gries, S. Th., B. Heller and T. Bernaisch (2016) ‘Epicentres in South and South-East Asian Englishes: empirical perspectives’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Hundt, M. and P. Rautionaho (2016) ‘Progressively progressive? A corpus- based study of the progressive in World Englishes’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Kirk, J. and G. Nelson (2016) ‘Taking stock of the International Corpus of English’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Kruger, H. and B. van Rooy (2016) ‘Register variation in contact varieties of English: a multidimensional analysis’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Kay, C.J. and K. Allan. 2016. ‘Change in the English Lexicon’. In: M. Kytö and P. Pahta (2016)(eds.), 203-219.
Kytö, M. and P. Pahta (2016)(eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lischynsky, N. and A. Beneteau (2016) ‘Improving Chinese students’ use of prominence and thought groups with corpus-derived speech samples’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Laporte, S. (2016) ‘The schematic to substantive patterning of make in New Englishes: A Construction Grammar approach’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Lavelle, T. (2016) ‘Temporal since in the ICE corpora: variation and three cultures of interpretation’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
López-Couso, M-J. and B. Méndez-Naya (2016) ‘From the Inner to the Outer Circle: A look at the epistemic adverbs perhaps and maybe in Hong Kong English and Philippine English’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Meierkord, C. (2016) ‘Reflections of local culture and identity in the lexicon of Ugandan English? Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics meets cultural studies’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Mehl, S., S.A. Wallis and B. Aarts (2016). ‘Language learning at your fingertips: deploying corpora in mobile teaching apps’. In K. Corrigan and A. Mearns (2016)(eds.), 211-239.
Méndez Naya, B. and M. J. López-Couso (2016) ‘On the competition between perhaps and maybe: A cross-varietal approach’. Paper presented at the 40th meeting of the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Qiu, Y. (2016) ‘Adjective comparison across speech and writing: A corpus study based on ICE-GB’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Pöldvere, N., M. Fuoli and C. Paradis (2016) ‘A study of dialogic expansion and contraction in spoken discourse using corpus and experimental techniques’. Corpora 11.2, 191-225.
Seoane, E. and L. Loureiro-Porto and C. Suárez-Gómez (2016) ‘The ICE project looks at Iberia: the International Corpus of Gibraltar English’. Paper presented at the 40th meeting of the Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. University of Zaragoza, Spain.
Terassa, L. (2016) ‘What corpora can and cannot tell us about grammatical variation in World Englishes: contrasting corpus findings with experimental data’. Paper presented at the 37th meeting of the International Computer Archive of Modern and Medieval English (ICAME), Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Werner, V., E. Seoane and C. Suárez-Gómez (2016)(eds.) Re-assessing the present perfect. Topics in English Linguistics (TiEL) 91. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bas Aarts
Director
January 2017
This page last modified 17 February, 2023 by 7Survey Web Administrator.