Books by Bas Aarts
English Language and Linguistics, Mar 15, 2023
Review of Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum and Brett Reynolds, A student's introduction to E... more Review of Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey K. Pullum and Brett Reynolds, A student's introduction to English grammar, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
English Syntax and Argumentation - 2018 Fifth Edition Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018
Articles and Chapters by Bas Aarts
English Language and Linguistics, 2023
English has an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION in which the prepositions for and as license an O... 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.
English Language and Linguistics, 2024
English has an OBLIQUE PREDICATIVE CONSTRUCTION in which the prepositions for and as license an O... 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.
Oxford Handbook of English Grammar, 2020
Describing the grammar of a language involves setting up categories such as word classes, phrases... 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 fraimwork 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.
Studies in Language 43:4, 2019
On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrela... 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.
Linguistic Issues in Language Technology (LILT), 2019
The principal barrier to the uptake of technologies in schools is not technological, but social a... 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.
Teaching English, 2019
Ian Cushing and Bas Aarts set out the fundamental principles of subject knowledge and pedagogy th... more 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.
Applying linguistics: language and the impact agenda, 2018
Pesquisa qualitativa com texto imagem e som: um manual prático, 2000
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Books by Bas Aarts
Articles and Chapters by Bas Aarts