Bas Aarts - Biography#

Professor of English Linguistics (since 2003) and Director of the Survey of English Usage (since 1997), Department of English Language and Literature, University College London.

Since January 1997 I have been the Director of the Survey of English Usage (SEU), an internationally recognised and highly regarded centre of excellence for research in the area of English Language and Linguistics. Founded by Professor the Lord Quirk in 1959, it is housed in the English Department at University College London. The SEU has been engaged in the study of the English language for more more than 65 years. The Survey is also known for its pioneering work in the areas grammar writing and corpus linguistics. The SEU created the British component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), compiled by Greenbaum, and the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), compiled by Aarts and Wallis. These corpora are state-of-the art resources for English language studies which can be searched using the innovative ICECUP software developed at the SEU. My Oxford modern English grammar (2011) uses data from ICE-GB. The sixtieth anniversary of the SEU was celebrated at a memorial event for Randolph Quirk with international speakers at the British Academy in July 2019. A second such event was held in July 2023, also at the British Academy. The SEU created an online platform called Englicious (englicious.org) to help teachers teach English grammar to young children. I am one of the Founding Editors of the scholarly journal English Language and Linguistics (Cambridge University Press).

I have been a member of editorial boards for journals and books.

To date (April 2024):

• 16 funded research projects
  
• 12 authored books, 6 edited books, 46 chapters in books and 20 journal articles
  
• 146 talks across the world, including 31 plenary lectures
  
• Visiting appointments at La Laguna, Sofia, Zürich, Santiago de Compostela, Sarajevo and Banja Luka, Jaén, Vigo, Molise, Lille 3, Yichang