The Survey of English Usage corpus

The Survey of  English Usage corpus was used in the development of one of the most importane Corpus-based Grammars, the Comprehensive Grammar of English. The Survey is based in the Departament of English Language and Literature at University College London. The original Survey Corpus predated modern computing. It was recorded on reel-to-reel tapes, then transcribed on paper, filled in filling cabinets and indexed on paper cards. Crystal and Quirk made  detailed prosodic and paralinguistic annotations in the transcriptions. Corpus searches required a visit to the Survey.

The current researches of the Survey include the construction and the exploration of  corpora. The ICE-GB, the British Component of the  International Corpus of English (ICE) was compiled at the Survey. It was annotated to a very detailed level, with a full grammatical analysis for every sentence in the corpus.

The Survey also created the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), with the word selection of the spoken part of the LLC (London-Lund Corpus), in a manner comparable with the ICE-GB and the  new 800,000 word diachronic corpus. These two corpora comprise the largest collection of parsed and corrected, orthographilly transcribed spoken English language data in the world.

The Survey have carried out research and development of software tools to help linguists to use these corpora. The ICECUP research platform uses an intuitive grammatical query representation called Fuzzy Tree Fragments (FTFs) to search parsed corpora.

Appart from creating these corpora and tools useful to the corpus linguistics research, they make research into English language. Recent projects include research on the English Noun Phrase, Subordination in Spoken and Written English, and the English Verb Phrase.

(2010). From answers.com . Retrieved 16:17 p.m. June 3, 2010.

(2010, June 3). From UCL The Survey of English Usage. Retrieved 16:17 p.m.June 3, 2010.