GRAMMAR AND LEXIS

A one-day symposium to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the Survey of English Usage

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 both 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 A 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 CD-ROM, together with dedicated search software and audio material.

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.

Programme:

9.00-9.30 Registration

9.30-9.40 Welcome

9.40-10.20 Geoffrey Leech: Diachronic linguistics across a generation gap: from the 1960s to the 1990s

10.20-11.00 David Crystal: The future of global English grammatical identity

11.00-11.20 Coffee

11.20-12.00 Noël Burton-Roberts: Realisation vs. representation in the treatment of case and agreement

12.00-12.40 Robert Ilson: Tough calls: making a useful corpus; making a corpus useful

12.40-14.00 Lunch

14.00-14.40 Frank Palmer: Negation and the modal verbs in English

14.40-15.20 Liliane Haegeman: On the subject of Bridget Jones

15.20-16.00 Randolph Quirk: Getting their clause into English: some problems of language spread

16.00-16.20 Tea

16.20-17.00 Katie Wales: Quirks, quizzes and questionnaires

17.00-17.45 Bas Aarts, Gerry Nelson and Sean Wallis: Using ICECUP for natural language exploration: a demonstration

17.45 Reception in the Chancellor's Hall

We kindly ask you to register for this event. Forms are available here. There will be a small charge for attendance: £18 for non-members of the Institute of English Studies, £10 for members and concessions.

Organised in collaboration with the Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London.

Enquiries

Institute of English Studies
Tel: 020 7862 8675
Fax: 020 7862 8672
email: ies@sas.ac.uk

Conference venue

Institute of English Studies
Third Floor
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1

Nearest underground stations: Russell Square and Tottenham Court Road.

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