Bas Aarts
University College London, English Language and Literature, Faculty Member
- Languages and Linguistics, English Grammar, Syntax, History of the English Language, Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, and 16 moreLinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Language Change, Categorization, Grammar, Fuzzy grammar, Progressive, Gradience, Morphology, English Departments in Europe, Historical Linguistics, English language and linguistics, Language Variation and Change, English language, English Literature, and English language and literatureedit
- http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english/staff/bas-aarts
http://www.grammarianism.wordpress.comedit
Review of Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum and Brett Reynolds, A student's introduction to English grammar, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
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Research Interests: Discourse Analysis, Second Language Acquisition, Pragmatics, Sociolinguistics, Corpus Consultation (Applied Linguistics), and 17 moreCorpus Creation, Corpus Linguistics, English Grammar, Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Lexicography and Corpus Studies, Applied Corpus Linguistics, Corpus Analysis, Corpus Stylistics, Grammar, Corpus, Error Analysis, Corpus-Based Approach to Lexis, Corpus Annotation, Contrastive Linguistics, Corpus-Based Studies, Exploring Corpora, and Syntax of English as a Second Language
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English has an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION in which the prepositions for and as license an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE COMPLEMENT that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The... more
English has an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION in which the prepositions for and as license an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE COMPLEMENT that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The construction with for is the oldest, and is found in many other languages. This article traces the history of oblique predicative constructions involving for and as, and a number of other prepositions, from Old English to Present-Day English (PDE). Visser (1963-73) has suggested that predicative for and as were rivals, and that in PDE as is now dominant at the expense of for. I will argue instead that since around 1900 predicative for and as can clearly be distinguished semantically as expressing the meanings qua ('as being') and qualitate qua ('in the capacity of'), respectively, and that the existence of these distinct meanings explains why constructions with both prepositions still survive in PDE.
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English has an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION in which the prepositions for and as license an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE COMPLEMENT that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The... more
English has an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION in which the prepositions for and as license an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE COMPLEMENT that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The construction with for is the oldest, and is found in many other languages. This paper traces the history of oblique predicative constructions involving for and as, and a number of other prepositions, from Old English to Present-Day English (PDE). Visser (1963-73) has suggested that predicative for and as were rivals, and that in PDE as is now dominant at the expense of for. I will argue instead that since around 1900 predicative for and as can clearly be distinguished semantically as expressing the meanings qua ('as being') and qualitate qua ('in the capacity of'), respectively, and that the existence of these distinct meanings explains why constructions with both prepositions still survive in PDE.
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Describing the grammar of a language involves setting up categories such as word classes, phrases and clauses (called a taxonomy), and creating a systematic and internally consistent explanatory account of how these categories relate to... more
Describing the grammar of a language involves setting up categories such as word classes, phrases and clauses (called a taxonomy), and creating a systematic and internally consistent explanatory account of how these categories relate to each other and how they combine to form larger units. But how many categories are needed, and how do we establish these larger units? This is a matter that naturally requires careful thought, and grammarians need to motivate the choices they make. Put differently, they need to make extensive use of argumentation to establish the framework of grammar that they are describing. Argumentation is a general notion which can be defined as an evidence-based step-by-step procedure for taking decisions. We all use various kinds of arguments all the time to take decisions in very different situations in our daily lives, for example in deciding whether to study linguistics, whether to buy a car or not, or where to go on holiday. In establishing grammatical descriptions, for example when deciding whether the word 'my' should be analysed as a pronoun, rather than as a possessive adjective, we also need to make use of reliable arguments. We refer to this as 'syntactic argumentation'.The aim of this chapter is to show how it plays a role in describing the grammar of English in many different ways. I will focus on grammar in the narrow sense, i.e. as referring to syntax, though some attention will also be paid to morphology.
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On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the... more
On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five-semantically related, and yet distinct, grammatical categories, all of which involve different degrees of non-realization of the verb situation in the area of Tense-Aspect-Mood: apprehensional; avertive; frustrated initiation; frustrated completion; inconsequential. Our major goal here is to account for these grammatical categories in terms of an adequate model of linguistic categorization. For this purpose, we apply the notion of Intersective Gradience (introduced for the first time in the morphosyntactic domain in Aarts (2004, 2007) to the morphosemantic domain. Thus the present approach reconciles two major approaches to linguistic categorization: (i) the classical, Aristotelian approach and (ii) a more recent, gradience/fuzziness approach.
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The principal barrier to the uptake of technologies in schools is not technological, but social and political. Teachers must be convinced of the pedagogical benefits of a particular curriculum before they will agree to learn the means to... more
The principal barrier to the uptake of technologies in schools is not technological, but social and political. Teachers must be convinced of the pedagogical benefits of a particular curriculum before they will agree to learn the means to teach it. The teaching of formal grammar to first language students in schools is no exception to this rule. Over the last three decades, most schools in England have been legally required to teach grammatical subject knowledge, i.e. linguistic knowledge of grammar terms and structure, to children age five and upwards as part of the national curriculum in English. A mandatory set of curriculum specifications for England and Wales was published in 2014, and elsewhere similar requirements were imposed. However, few current English school teachers were taught grammar themselves, and the dominant view has long been in favour of 'real books' rather than the teaching of a formal grammar. English grammar teaching thus faces multiple challenges: to convince teachers of the value of grammar in their own teaching, to teach the teachers the knowledge they need, and to develop relevant resources to use in the classroom. Alongside subject knowledge, teachers need pedagogical knowledge-how to teach grammar effectively and how to integrate this teaching into other kinds of language learning. The paper introduces the Englicious 1 web platform for schools, and 1 The Englicious project was funded by the UK research councils AHRC 1-2 / LiLT volume 18, issue 5 July 2019 summarises its development and impact since publication. Englicious draws data from the fully-parsed British Component of the International Corpus of English, ICE-GB. The corpus offers plentiful examples of genuine natural language, speech and writing, with context and potentially audio playback. However, corpus examples may be age-inappropriate or over-complex, and without grammar training, teachers are insufficiently equipped to use them. In the absence of grammatical knowledge among teachers, it is insufficient simply to give teachers and children access to a corpus. Whereas so-called 'classroom concordancing' approaches offer access to tools and encourage bottom-up learning, Englicious approaches the question of grammar teaching in a concept-driven, top-down way. It contains a modular series of professional development resources, lessons and exercises focused on each concept in turn, in which corpus examples are used extensively. Teachers must be able to discuss with a class why, for instance, work is a noun in a particular sentence, rather than merely report that it is. The paper describes the development of Englicious from secondary to primary, and outlines some of the practical challenges facing the design of this type of teaching resource. A key question, the 'selection problem', concerns how tools parameterise the selection of relevant examples for teaching purposes. Finally we discuss curricula for teaching teachers and the evaluation of the effectiveness of the intervention.
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Ian Cushing and Bas Aarts set out the fundamental principles of subject knowledge and pedagogy that teachers need to know to approach grammar teaching effectively.
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The lexical item for is historically a preposition, though in Present-Day English it is also often categorized as a subordinator/complementizer in so-called for…to constructions (Rosenbaum 1967, Bresnan 1972). In this paper I will begin... more
The lexical item for is historically a preposition, though in Present-Day English it is also often categorized as a subordinator/complementizer in so-called for…to constructions (Rosenbaum 1967, Bresnan 1972). In this paper I will begin by offering an overview of the syntactic structures in which for appears. I will then focus on the analysis of for as a complementizer in for…to constructions which has become commonplace, and has rarely been questioned. First I will discuss the arguments that have been put forward to support this analysis critically, and will then argue instead that for is in fact always a preposition. I will offer an analysis which can account for constructions in which for licenses an NP, a finite clause, a to-infinitive clause, or an -ing-clause. This will result in simplified lexical entries for many verbs that license complements involving for.
UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development... more
UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development are, on the one hand, verbal nouns heading noun phrases, as in [The deliberate sinking of the ship] was a criminal act, and, on the other hand, verbs heading clausal structures, as in [The navy deliberately sinking the ship] was a criminal act. The heads of these bracketed constructions are called gerunds in many grammars, despite the differences between them, e.g. the fact that in the second example sinking licenses a subject and an object. In this paper we study the distribution of the second type of structure in PDE – which we call –ing clauses – taking into account the dependents the verb takes, the functions that the clause as a whole can perform, and how their use and frequency has changed over recent decades. We use the data we obtain to contribute to the question of whether the label 'gerund' still has a role to play in the grammar of English. Our findings show that over the time period 1960–1990, –ing clauses functioning as direct object and as adverbial increasingly tend to contain an explicit subject. We argue that this suggests that –ing clauses have tended to become more clausal over time in spoken British English. We use the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day English (DCPSE) as our dataset.
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A short biography of Otto Jespersen in Babel Magazine, February 2016
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Participants in dialogue often use clause fragments, such as At Camberwell or A cheap bottle, which are structurally incomplete but in fact make complete contributions to the discourse. Their interpretation depends on their links to other... more
Participants in dialogue often use clause fragments, such as At Camberwell or A cheap bottle, which are structurally incomplete but in fact make complete contributions to the discourse. Their interpretation depends on their links to other structures in the context. The hypothesis that will be explored in this paper is that just a few different kinds of grammatical link are exploited recurrently to serve a wide range of discourse purposes. Based on systematic analysis of a set of data drawn from the dialogues in the ICE-GB corpus, we argue that two frequent grammatical subtypes can be distinguished, which we label extensions and matches. Extensions are interpretable as added constituents of antecedent structures in context, while matches are interpretable as alternative constituents of antecedent structures. These antecedents may be uttered by either the same speaker or another speaker. We show how fragments fulfil a wide range of discourse functions and contribute to discourse cohesion. A second aim of the paper is to argue against what we call the ‘strict ellipsis’ account of clause fragments, which claims that the ‘missing’ material can be recovered directly from the preceding context. We use authentic corpus examples, rarely considered in ellipsis debates, to show that such an account is untenable.
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This is a draft version of the chapter entitled 'Syntactic argumentation', which is to appear in Bas Aarts, Jill Bowie and Gergana Popova (eds.) Oxford Handbook of English Grammar.
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This is a draft version of the chapter entitled 'Syntactic argumentation', which is to appear in Bas Aarts, Jill Bowie and Gergana Popova (eds.) Oxford Handbook of English Grammar.
Research Interests: Research Methodology, Argumentation, Theoretical Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, and their Interfaces. Experimental Linguistics (Sentence Processing, Prosody, Statistical Analysis) Second language acquisition theory and Teaching methodology, TESOL (certificate with distinction), and syntactic argumentation
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English has an oblique predicative construction in which the prepositions for and as license an oblique predicative complement that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The... more
English has an oblique predicative construction in which the prepositions for and as license an oblique predicative complement that is predicated of a noun phrase, as in We took her for a friend and I regarded her as a genius. The construction with for is the oldest, and is found in many other languages. This article traces the history of oblique predicative constructions involving for and as, and a number of other prepositions, from Old English to Present-Day English (PDE). Visser (1963–73) has suggested that predicative for and as were rivals, and that in PDE as is now dominant at the expense of for. I will argue instead that since around 1900 predicative for and as can clearly be distinguished semantically as expressing the meanings qua (‘as being’) and qualitate qua (‘in the capacity of’), respectively, and that the existence of these distinct meanings explains why constructions with both prepositions still survive in PDE.
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This book brings together classic and recent papers in the philosophical and linguistic analysis of fuzzy grammar, gradience in meaning, word classes, and syntax. Issues such as how many grains make a heap, when a puddle becomes a pond,... more
This book brings together classic and recent papers in the philosophical and linguistic analysis of fuzzy grammar, gradience in meaning, word classes, and syntax. Issues such as how many grains make a heap, when a puddle becomes a pond, and so forth, have occupied thinkers since Aristotle and over the last two decades been the subject of increasing interest among linguists as well as in fields such as artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. The work is designed to be of use to students in all these fields. It has a substantial introduction, is divided into thematic parts, contains annotated sections of further reading, and is fully indexed.
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... Preface ix Introduction: The Nature of Grammatical Categories and their Representation I PART I Philosophical Background 29 I Categories 31 Aristotle 2 Concepts 33 Gottlob Frege 3 Vagueness 35 Bertrand Russell 4 Family Resemblances 41... more
... Preface ix Introduction: The Nature of Grammatical Categories and their Representation I PART I Philosophical Background 29 I Categories 31 Aristotle 2 Concepts 33 Gottlob Frege 3 Vagueness 35 Bertrand Russell 4 Family Resemblances 41 Ludwig Wittgenstein 5 The ...
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UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development... more
UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development are, on the one hand, verbal nouns heading noun phrases, as in [The deliberate sinking of the ship] was a criminal act, and, on the other hand, verbs heading clausal structures, as in [The navy deliberately sinking the ship] was a criminal act. The heads of these bracketed constructions are called gerunds in many grammars, despite the differences between them, e.g. the fact that in the second example sinking licenses a subject and an object. In this paper we study the distribution of the second type of structure in PDE – which we call –ing clauses – taking into account the dependents the verb takes, the functions that the clause as a whole can perform, and how their use and frequency has changed over recent decades. We use the data we obtain to contribute to the question of whether the label 'gerund' still has a role to play in the grammar of English. Our findings show that over the time period 1960–1990, –ing clauses functioning as direct object and as adverbial increasingly tend to contain an explicit subject. We argue that this suggests that –ing clauses have tended to become more clausal over time in spoken British English. We use the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day English (DCPSE) as our dataset.
Research Interests: History and Linguistics
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Varieties of English Around the World C29 Exploring Natura Language Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English Cerald Nelson, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts John Benjamins Publishing Company ... Exploring Natural... more
Varieties of English Around the World C29 Exploring Natura Language Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English Cerald Nelson, Sean Wallis and Bas Aarts John Benjamins Publishing Company ... Exploring Natural Language Working with the ...
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In this chapter we discuss novel ways of teaching English using new technology. The chapter begins with a brief history of language pedagogy and why current practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching, has not always been... more
In this chapter we discuss novel ways of teaching English using new technology. The chapter begins with a brief history of language pedagogy and why current practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching, has not always been satisfactory. We then describe the creation of a number of apps for the teaching of the English language, specifically the interactive Grammar of English (iGE), Academic Writing in English (AWE) and English Spelling and Punctuation (ESP). These apps use corpora to source example sentences dynamically and to populate exercises.
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This book, the first in the new descriptively and empirically oriented CUP series Studies in English Language, is a corpus-based monogra~h on to-infinitival com-U I plement clauses in English. It is organised into four chapters: an... more
This book, the first in the new descriptively and empirically oriented CUP series Studies in English Language, is a corpus-based monogra~h on to-infinitival com-U I plement clauses in English. It is organised into four chapters: an in-troduction on methodological issues ( ...
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Parameters of Collocation: The Word in the Centre of Gravity Oliver Mason University of Birmingham Abstract Collocation is an important and widely used concept in corpus linguistics. Despite its cen-tral role in the corpus-based analysis... more
Parameters of Collocation: The Word in the Centre of Gravity Oliver Mason University of Birmingham Abstract Collocation is an important and widely used concept in corpus linguistics. Despite its cen-tral role in the corpus-based analysis of lexis, the process of computing collocates ...
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<p>The aim of this chapter is to discuss the role of syntactic argumentation in the description of English grammar. The chapter first discusses some of the general principles that are used in syntactic argumentation, namely... more
<p>The aim of this chapter is to discuss the role of syntactic argumentation in the description of English grammar. The chapter first discusses some of the general principles that are used in syntactic argumentation, namely <italic>economy</italic> and <italic>elegance</italic>, which are regarded as two dimensions of <italic>simplicity</italic>. These principles are then exemplified in a number of case studies. The final section discusses how argumentation can be used to establish constituency in clauses.</p>
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UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development... more
UCL Historically, the English gerund is an action noun which, from the Middle English period onwards, could gradually also be used as a verb (Jack 1988, Fanego 1996a/b, 1998, 2004). In Present-Day English the reflexes of this development are, on the one hand, verbal nouns heading noun phrases, as in [The deliberate sinking of the ship] was a criminal act, and, on the other hand, verbs heading clausal structures, as in [The navy deliberately sinking the ship] was a criminal act. The heads of these bracketed constructions are called gerunds in many grammars, despite the differences between them, e.g. the fact that in the second example sinking licenses a subject and an object. In this paper we study the distribution of the second type of structure in PDE – which we call –ing clauses – taking into account the dependents the verb takes, the functions that the clause as a whole can perform, and how their use and frequency has changed over recent decades. We use the data we obtain to contribute to the question of whether the label &#39;gerund&#39; still has a role to play in the grammar of English. Our findings show that over the time period 1960–1990, –ing clauses functioning as direct object and as adverbial increasingly tend to contain an explicit subject. We argue that this suggests that –ing clauses have tended to become more clausal over time in spoken British English. We use the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day English (DCPSE) as our dataset.
Research Interests: History and Linguistics
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© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Dan McIntyre and Hazel Price; individual chapters, the contributors. The Englicious website provides school teachers with innovative, interactive English language and English grammar teaching... more
© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Dan McIntyre and Hazel Price; individual chapters, the contributors. The Englicious website provides school teachers with innovative, interactive English language and English grammar teaching materials. The resources are based on research conducted within the Survey of English Usage (SEU) at the University College London and make use of three major corpora of natural English language data, compiled at SEU since the 1950s. The corpora were not originally intended to have any specific impact outside of academia. However, in response to the new Higher Education impact agenda and the renewed emphasis on the study of language, especially grammar, in the 2014 U.K. Primary and Secondary National Curriculums, we sought and successfully gained funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to develop Englicious as a means of providing much-needed support for teachers. In this chapter, we measure and evaluate the impact of Englicious on teaching practice and consider how further feedback on impact could be gathered. We also discuss the steps we have taken to generate and boost impact, such as through social media and marketing events, and the challenges we have faced relating to time investment, funding and resources. One funding solution has been the development of two Continued Professional Development courses, which have subsequently not only become a means of measuring and increasing the impact of Englicious but have also become ‘impactful’ in their own right. Overall, the Englicious project has had a measurable impact and has led to unforeseen and exciting opportunities, though delivering the impact agenda has been challenging at times and further support, particularly administrative and marketing support, is required to continue generating impact.
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An 800,000 word corpus of spontaneous spoken British English containing equal amounts of directly comparable material from 1960-1976 and from the early 1990s. The corpus is textually annotated (marking sentence boundaries, speakers,... more
An 800,000 word corpus of spontaneous spoken British English containing equal amounts of directly comparable material from 1960-1976 and from the early 1990s. The corpus is textually annotated (marking sentence boundaries, speakers, overlaps etc.), as well as grammatically annotated (tagged and parsed), indexed, and fully searchable with ICECUP, using Fuzzy Tree Fragments and other query systems. The resource features a lexicon (a database of word-tag combinations in the corpus) and a grammaticon (a database of node combinations). These will enable users to contrast lexical and grammatical distributions in the LLC and ICE. The resource is an invaluable research tool for linguists interested in present-day English grammar, as well as for those interested in current changes in this domain.
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The principal barrier to the uptake of technologies in schools is not technological, but social and political. Teachers must be convinced of the pedagogical benefits of a particular curriculum before they will agree to learn the means to... more
The principal barrier to the uptake of technologies in schools is not technological, but social and political. Teachers must be convinced of the pedagogical benefits of a particular curriculum before they will agree to learn the means to teach it. The teaching of formal grammar to first language students in schools is no exception to this rule. Over the last three decades, most schools in England have been legally required to teach grammatical subject knowledge, i.e. linguistic knowledge of grammar terms and structure, to children age five and upwards as part of the national curriculum in English. A mandatory set of curriculum specifications for England and Wales was published in 2014, and elsewhere similar requirements were imposed. However, few current English school teachers were taught grammar themselves, and the dominant view has long been in favour of ‘real books’ rather than the teaching of a formal grammar. English grammar teaching thus faces multiple challenges: to convince...
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On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the... more
On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five – semantically related, and yet distinct grammatical categories, all of which involve different degrees of non-realization of the verb situation in the area of Tense-Aspect-Mood: apprehensional, avertive, frustrated initiation, frustrated completion, inconsequential. Our major goal here is to account for these grammatical categories in terms of an adequate model of linguistic categorization. For this purpose, we apply the notion of Intersective Gradience (introduced for the first time in the morphosyntactic domain in Aarts (2004, 2007) to the morphosemantic domain. Thus the present approach reconciles two major approaches to linguistic categorization: (i) the classical, Aristotelian approach and (ii) a more recen...
Research Interests: Computer Science, Languages and Linguistics, Language Variation and Change, Linguistics, Categorization, and 12 moreMorphology and Syntax, Grammar, Language Studies, Verb, Avertive, Linguistic Categorization, Categorization in linguistics, frustrated initiation, frustrated completion, inconsequential, semantically elaborate grammatical categories, and apprehensional
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Hudson refers to the highlighted string as a verbal gerund, as opposed to a nominal gerund, such as eg the reading of this article. The latter is outside the scope of Hudson's paper. In essence his proposal is to regard the word... more
Hudson refers to the highlighted string as a verbal gerund, as opposed to a nominal gerund, such as eg the reading of this article. The latter is outside the scope of Hudson's paper. In essence his proposal is to regard the word having in (1) as belonging to the ...
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This article explores recent grammatical change in the English perfect construction, with special focus on the infinitival perfect. Previous studies have typically drawn on written data, whereas this study reports on spoken data drawn... more
This article explores recent grammatical change in the English perfect construction, with special focus on the infinitival perfect. Previous studies have typically drawn on written data, whereas this study reports on spoken data drawn from the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English, based at the Survey of English Usage, University College London. This is a parsed corpus of British English which includes a wide range of spoken genres and spans the period from the 1960s to the 1990s. First, the article compares the main inflectional subtypes of the perfect (present, past and infinitival) in terms of changing frequencies of use. Significant declines in frequency (measured per million words) are reported for the past perfect and infinitival perfect, while the present perfect appears stable. Next, the article focuses on the behaviour of the infinitival perfect in different grammatical contexts, showing that its decline within the context of a preceding modal auxiliary is indepen...
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Preface, Introduction: theoretical and descriptive approaches to the study of the verb in English Bas Aarts and Charles F. Meyer, Part I. Theoretical Approaches to the Study of the English Verb: 2. Grammatical relations in English Charles... more
Preface, Introduction: theoretical and descriptive approaches to the study of the verb in English Bas Aarts and Charles F. Meyer, Part I. Theoretical Approaches to the Study of the English Verb: 2. Grammatical relations in English Charles F. Meyer, 3. Competence without ...
Research Interests: History, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Linguistics, and 5 moreLanguage, Modal Verb, Verb, ADVERB, and Adjective
ABSTRACT
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UCL logo UCL LIBRARY SERVICES. UCL Eprints. ...
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The determiner slot in English interrogative Noun Phrases allows for three possible occupants, namely which, what and whose, and their variants ending in -ever: whichever, whatever and whosever. In this paper we will be looking only at... more
The determiner slot in English interrogative Noun Phrases allows for three possible occupants, namely which, what and whose, and their variants ending in -ever: whichever, whatever and whosever. In this paper we will be looking only at the first two of these, which and ...
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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... more
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.
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Review of the second edition of A student’s introduction to English grammar