Bas Aarts

Bas Aarts is Professor of English Linguistics and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London.

His publications include Small Clauses in English: the Nonverbal Types (1992), The Verb in Contemporary English (1995, edited with Charles F. Meyer), Investigating Natural Language: Working with the British Component of the International Corpus of English (2002, with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis), Fuzzy Grammar: a Reader (2004, edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer and Gergana Popova), Syntactic Gradience: the Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy (2007), Oxford Modern English Grammar (2011), Oxford Dictionary of English grammar (2014, with Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner), The Verb Phrase in English (2013, edited with Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis), English Syntax and Argumentation (fifth edition 2018), How to Teach Grammar (2019, with Ian Cushing and Richard Hudson), The Handbook of English Linguistics (2020, second edition, edited with April McMahon and Lars Hinrichs), Oxford Handbook of English Grammar (2020, edited with Jill Bowie and Gergana Popova), English Grammar: All You Need to Know (2020), as well as many articles in books and journals. With David Denison and the late Richard Hogg he is one of the founding editors of the journal English Language and Linguistics.

Aarts leads a team working on Englicious, a website which makes available to pupils and teachers a wide variety of innovative teaching materials on English grammar, including lesson plans, interactive exercises, projects, glossaries, etc., as well as background materials for teachers to improve their understanding of English grammar, e.g. videos. Englicious helps pupils and teachers to prepare for the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling test (SPAG test) in Year 6. It will also help secondary school pupils to prepare for their GCSEs and A-levels, in which there is a new emphasis on the correct use of grammar, spelling and punctuation. Englicious is available at www.englicious.org.