Bas Aarts

Exploring natural language: working with the British component of the international corpus of English

ICE-GB is a 1 million-word corpus of contemporary British English. It is fully parsed, and contains over 83,000 syntactic trees. Together with the dedicated retrieval software, ICECUP, ICE-GB is an unprecedented resource for the study of English syntax. Exploring Natural Language is a comprehensive guide to both corpus and software. It contains a full reference for ICE-GB. The chapters on ICECUP provide complete instructions on the use of the many features of the software, including concordancing, lexical and grammatical searches, sociolinguistic queries, random sampling, and searching for syntactic structures using ICECUPs Fuzzy Tree Fragment models. Special attention is given to the principles of experimental design in a parsed corpus. Six case studies provide step-by-step illustrations of how the corpus and software can be used to explore real linguistic issues, from simple lexical studies to more complex syntactic topics, such as noun phrase structure, verb transitivity, and voice.

Verb-preposition Constructions and Small Clauses in English.

The analysis of verb-particle constructions, or verb-preposition constructions, as I will call them, has-given rise to much debate in the linguistic literature over a long period of time. Traditionally, a bipartite classification of these structures has been assumed consisting of a class of ‘phrasal verbs’, such as those in (1) and (2), and a class of ‘prepositional verbs’, such as those in (3): (1) I switched the light off. (2) I looked the information up. (3) Look at the prospectus: it clearly states that your admission depends on your examination results.

The verb in contemporary English : theory and description

This collection of essays sheds new light on the verb in English. The authors illustrate that verbs can only be properly understood if studied from both a ...

Binominal noun phrases in English

This paper discusses the structural and semantic properties of Binominal Noun Phrases (BNPs) in English. BNPs involve two nominals, N1 and N2, which are in a Subject-Predicate relationship with each other, such that N1 is the Predicate and N2 the Subject. Examples are a hell of a problem, a wonder of a city, that idiot of a prime minister etc. On the basis of various types of syntactic evidence, it is argued that they are headed by the second of the two nominals, not by the first one, as has often been claimed. It is further argued that BNPs do not involve movement, as has recently been suggested in the literature. A consequence of this study is that it supports viewing syntax as a flexible system, in which there may be a tension between a rigid arrangement of elements into categories and constituents, and the occurrence of unexpected configurations, or of shifts in patterns taking place diachronically or synchronically.

Bridging the Grammar Gap: teaching English grammar to the iPhone generation

For second language learners, the value of the explicit teaching of English grammar has never been questioned. However, in recent times there has been dissent about whether or not to teach English grammar to native speakers. From the late 1960s onwards English grammar teaching in the United Kingdom largely disappeared from the curriculum, and was replaced by teachers focusing on students learning to express themselves. This was in the main not a bad thing, because it made students active participants in their own learning, and they were expected to think critically and express themselves well. The teaching of grammar, with its emphasis on rules, drilling and learning by rote, was seen as conformist, dull and unnecessary, and this view seemed to be confirmed by research into the effectiveness of grammar teaching.

Using Fuzzy Tree Fragments to explore English grammar

Readers of ET may recall two papers, the first by the late Sidney Greenbaum (‘ICE: the International Corpus of English,’ ET 7, 1991, 3–7), the second and by Akiva Quinn & Nick Porter (‘Investigating English Usage with ICECUP’, ET 10, 1994, pp. 21–24) which introduced the International Corpus of English (ICE) and its search facility ICECUP (the ICE Corpus Utility Programme). The present paper has a two-fold aim: to (re-)acquaint readers with ICE and discuss the latest developments in ICECUP – including its recent release on CD-ROM. The International Corpus of English was initiated by Sidney Greenbaum, whose aim was to set up a number of identically constructed corpora (for the purpose of grammar research) in the worlds various English-speaking countries.

The verb phrase in English : investigating recent language change with corpora

1. Introduction Bas Aarts, Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis 2. Choices over time: methodological issues in investigating current change Bas Aarts, Joanne Close and Sean Wallis 3. Recent shifts with three nonfinite verbal complements in English: data from the 100 million word TIME Corpus (1920s-2000s) Mark Davies 4. Verb structures in twentieth-century British English Nicholas Smith and Geoffrey Leech 5. Nominalizing the verb phrase in academic science writing Douglas Biber and Bethany Gray 6. The verb phrase in contemporary Canadian English Sali Tagliamonte 7. Recent change and grammaticalization Manfred Krug and Ole Schutzler 8. The progressive verb in modern American English Magnus Levin 9. I was just reading this article - on the expression of recentness and the English past progressive Meike Pfaff, Alexander Bergs and Thomas Hoffmann 10. Bare infinitival complements in present-day English Marcus Callies 11. Operator and negative contraction in spoken British English: a change in progress Jose Ramon Varela Perez 12. The development of comment clauses Gunther Kaltenbock 13. The perfect in spoken British English Jill Bowie, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts 14. Changes in the verb phrase in legislative language in English Christopher Williams 15. Modals and semi-modals of obligation in American English: some aspects of developments from 1990 until the present day Stig Johansson.

The Verb Phrase in English: The perfect in spoken British English

The English perfect construction involves the perfect auxiliary have followed by a verb in the past participle form. It occurs in several subtypes according to the inflectional form of the auxiliary. The most frequently occurring is the present perfect, as in She has seen them. The other subtypes are the past perfect (She had seen them), the infinitival perfect (She must have seen them) and the -ing-participial perfect (Having seen them, she went home). All subtypes typically function to express anteriority (i.e. pastness relative to a reference point), although further semantic complexities have led to varying treatments of the perfect, for example as an aspect or a secondary tense system. Research on the English perfect has revealed considerable variation in use both diachronically, across longer historical periods, and synchronically, across regions and dialects. Recent trends in perfect usage are therefore of interest. The study presented here investigates this topic with regard to spoken standard British English. Much previous work has focused mainly or exclusively on the present perfect. However, here we investigate all inflectional subtypes of the perfect in terms of frequency changes over time. The findings on the present perfect are compared with those of other researchers. We then focus in more detail on the past perfect and infinitival perfect, to seek explanations for the frequency changes observed.

English word classes and phrases

Book description: This Handbook of English Linguistics brings together articles from the core areas of English linguistics, including syntax, phonetics, phonology, morphology, as well as variation, discourse, stylistics, and usage. Written by specialists from around the world, each contribution provides an introduction to a key area of English linguistics and includes a discussion of the most recent theoretical and descriptive research, as well as extensive bibliographic references. Together they provide a state–of–the–art account of English linguistics and is a valuable resource for both students and researchers.

Profiling the English verb phrase over time: Modal patterns

© Cambridge University Press 2015.In recent work it has been demonstrated by various scholars that the use of modal verbs has changed in past decades (Krug 2000; Leech 2003; Smith 2003; and especially Leech et al. 2009). In earlier work Close and Aarts (2010) and Aarts, Close, and Wallis (2013) looked at the changing use of the modal and semi-modal auxiliaries in spoken English. While the results of these investigations are extremely valuable, they tell us very little about how modal verb usage has changed within the various modal verb phrase patterns.To our knowledge no one has ever looked at the frequencies of these various patterns, let alone how they have changed over time. In Section 4.2 we briefly introduce the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE; Aarts and Wallis 2006) which has been used as a database for the present research. In Section 4.3 we look at previous research on changes in the use of modal verbs as individual items (‘core modals’) in written English. We will compare our findings on spoken English with those obtained by Leech (2003) and Leech et al. (2009) for written English in Section 4.4. In Section 4.5 we look at relative changes, while in Section 4.6 we will present the results of the research we have done on modal verbs occurring in various patterns, and how modal usage in these patterns has developed over time. In Section 4.7 we discuss our results. The final section is the conclusion. The database: Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English DCPSE is a corpus of parsed (grammatically analyzed) spoken English which contains approximately 885,000 words: 464,000 taken from the London-Lund Corpus (LLC) which was collected between the 1960s and 1970s (Svartvik 1990 and Nelson et al. 2002) and 421,000 words from the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) dating from the early 1990s. The phrase structure analysis used is a highly detailed ‘traditional’ one based on Quirk et al. (1985), familiar to many linguists.