Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at UCL. His publications include: Syntactic gradience (2007, OUP), Oxford modern English grammar (2011, OUP), The English verb phrase (edited with J. Close, G. Leech and S. Wallis, 2013, CUP), The Oxford dictionary of English grammar (edited with S. Chalker and E. Weiner, 2nd edition, 2014, OUP), How to teach grammar (with I. Cushing and R. Hudson, 2019, OUP), The Oxford handbook of English grammar (edited with J. Bowie and G. Popova, 2020, OUP), the Handbook of English Linguistics (edited with A. McMahon and L. Hinrichs, 2nd edition, 2021, Wiley), English syntax and argumentation (sixth edition, 2024, Bloomsbury), as well as book chapters and articles in journals. He is a founding editor of the journal English Language and Linguistics (CUP).

Contact details:

Department of English Language and Literature

UCL

Gower Street

London WC1E 6BT

UK

b.aarts@ucl.ac.uk

ABSTRACT

In this seminar I will discuss the use of the corpora developed at the Survey of English Usage at University College London for researching the grammar of English. Specifically, I will discuss the use of the two corpora we developed at UCL, namely the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB; Nelson et al. 2002) and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day English (DCPSE). 

Both corpora can be explored using the software package ICECUP (International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Programme). I will discuss some recent research findings, and I will also explore ways in which we have used these corpora to develop the web platform Englicious (englicious.org), which helps teachers teach English grammar in English primary schools and secondary schools. 

Reference

Nelson, G., S. Wallis and B. Aarts (2002) Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the International Corpus of English. Varieties of English around the World series. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Links

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/ice-gb/

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/projects/dcpse/index.htm

www.englicious.org