science

Survey of English Usage

Survey of English Usage is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Survey of English Usage rather than just read about it. In short: The Survey of English Usage was the first research centre in Europe to carry out research with corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.

Key takeaways

Survey of English Usage belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Survey of English Usage to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Survey of English Usage from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The Survey of English Usage was the first research centre in Europe to carry out research with corpora. The Survey is based in the Department of English Language and Literature at University College London.

History The Survey of English Usage was founded as the Survey of Spoken English at Durham University in 1959 by Randolph Quirk, moving with him to University College London in 1960. Many well-known linguists have spent time doing research at the Survey, including Bas Aarts, Valerie Adams, John Algeo, Dwight Bolinger, Noël Burton-Roberts, David Crystal, Derek Davy, Jan Firbas, Sidney Greenbaum, Liliane Haegeman, Robert Ilson, Ruth Kempson, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Rusiecki, Jan Svartvik, and Joe Taglicht. The current director is Bas Aarts. It was originally deposited in huge metal fireproof cabinets in two or three rooms in the Foster Court of UCL. The original Survey Corpus predated modern computing. It was recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, transcribed on paper, filed in filing cabinets, and indexed on paper cards. Transcriptions were annotated with a detailed prosodic and paralinguistic annotation developed by Crystal and Quirk (1964). Sets of paper cards were manually annotated for grammatical structures and filed, so, for example, all noun phrases could be found in the noun phrase filing cabinet in the Survey. Naturally, corpus searches required a visit to the Survey. This corpus is now known more widely as the London-Lund Corpus (LLC), as it was the responsibility of co-workers in Lund, Sweden, to computerise the corpus. Thirty-four of the spoken texts were published in book form as Svartvik and Quirk (1980), and the corpus was used as the basis for the famous book A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985).

Current research

Constructing corpora In 1988 Sidney Greenbaum proposed a new project, ICE, the International Corpus of English. ICE was to be an international project, carried out at research centres around the world, to compile corpora of English varieties where English was the first or second official language. ICE texts would contain spoken and written English in a balanced sample of one million words per component so that these samples could be compared in a wide variety of ways. The ICE project continues around the world to the present day. ICE-GB, the British Component of ICE, was compiled at the Survey. ICE-GB was annotated to a very detailed level, including constructing a full grammatical analysis (parse) for every sentence in the corpus. The first release of ICE-GB took place in 1998. ICE-GB was distributed with software for searching and exploring the parsed corpus called ICECUP. Release 2 of ICE-GB has now been released and is available on CD. As well as contrasting varieties of English, many researchers are interested in language development and change over time. A recent project at the Survey undertook the parsing of a large (400,000 word) selection of the spoken part of the LLC in a manner directly comparable with ICE-GB, forming a new, 800,000 word diachronic corpus, called the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE). DCPSE has now been released and is available on CD from the Survey. These two corpora comprise the largest collection of parsed and corrected, orthographically transcribed spoken English language data in the world, with over one million words of spoken English in this form.

Exploring corpora Parsed corpora are large databases containing detailed grammatical tree structures. One of the consequences of forming large collections of valuable linguistic data is a pressing need for methods and tools to help researchers and other users make the most of them. So in parallel with the parsing of natural language data, the Survey team have carried out research and development of software tools to help linguists use these corpora. The ICECUP research platform uses an intuitive grammatical query representation called Fuzzy Tree Fragments (FTFs) to search parsed corpora.

Linguistic research with corpora As well as distributing corpora and tools to the corpus linguistics research community, the SEU carries out research into English language. Recent projects include research on the English Noun Phrase, Subordination in Spoken and Written English, and the English Verb Phrase. The Survey also provides support for PhD students who carry out research into English language corpora.

References

External links Official website

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Survey of English Usage

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Survey of English Usage claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Survey of English Usage before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Survey of English Usage ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Survey of English Usage

In research: Survey of English Usage appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Survey of English Usage in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Survey of English Usage is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Applied linguistics, Corpus linguistics, Corpus linguistics stubs, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Survey of English Usage outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

Ask Teacher Smith questions about this articleOpens your AI tutor with a question about “Survey of English Usage” →

Affiliate

Preply — study more efficiently by working with a personal tutor. 50% off.

How to study Survey of English Usage in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Survey of English Usage means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Survey of English Usage out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Survey of English Usage in simple terms?

Why does Survey of English Usage matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Survey of English Usage?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Survey of English Usage.