Draft:Bas Aarts

• Comment: In accordance with Wikipedia's Conflict of interest guideline, I disclose that I have a conflict of interest regarding the subject of this article. ~2026-42364-01 (talk) 14:36, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

---

---

Bas Aarts, MA PhD MAE is a Dutch-born British linguist and academic. He is Professor of English Linguistics at University College London (UCL) and Director of the Survey of English Usage (SEU), a research unit specialising in English grammar, corpus linguistics, and language variation.

His research has focused on English syntax, grammatical theory, corpus linguistics, and the teaching of English grammar.

Early life and education

Aarts was born in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He was educated at Utrecht University and at University College London (UCL), where he obtained an MA and a PhD in English Linguistics.

Academic career

Aarts became a lecturer at UCL in 1989, and was appointed Professor of English Linguistics in 2003. Since 1997 he has served as Director of the Survey of English Usage, succeeding in the tradition established by Randolph Quirk, who founded the unit in 1959. Under his leadership, scholars at the SEU have continued work on English grammar, corpus-based linguistic research and language variation and change.

The SEU is the home of the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), which is the British constituent of the International Corpus of English, used by scholars globally to study different varieties of English (World Englishes). and with Sean Wallis he compiled the Diachronic Corpus of Present-Day Spoken English (DCPSE), used to study changes in the English language over shorter period of time, typically decades. These resources have been widely used in linguistic research and language teaching.

Research and grant funding

Aarts's research interests include:

• English syntax and morphology
• Grammatical theory
• Syntactic gradience
• Corpus linguistics
• English grammar pedagogy
• Modern English language structure

His publications have addressed issues such as grammatical indeterminacy, verb phrase structure, English word classes, and language change.

Aarts was awarded external funding for a large number of research projects.

Publications

Books

• Small Clauses in English: the Nonverbal Types (1992). Mouton De Gruyter.
• The Verb in Contemporary English: Theory and Description (1995; edited with Charles F. Meyer). Cambridge University Press.
• Exploring Natural Language: the British Component of the International Corpus of English (2002; with Gerald Nelson and Sean Wallis). John Benjamins.
• English Syntax and Argumentation (six editions, latest in 2024; also in Korean). Bloomsbury.
• Fuzzy Grammar: a Reader (2004; edited with David Denison, Evelien Keizer and Gergana Popova). Oxford University Press.
• Syntactic Gradience: the Nature of Grammatical Indeterminacy (2007). Oxford University Press.
• Oxford Modern English Grammar (2011). Oxford University Press.
• The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Language Change with Corpora (2013; edited with Joanne Close, Geoffrey Leech and Sean Wallis). Cambridge University Press.
• The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar (2014; with Sylvia Chalker and Edmund Weiner). Oxford University Press.
• How to Teach Grammar (2019; with Ian Cushing and Richard Hudson). Oxford University Press.
• The Oxford Handbook of English Grammar (2020; edited with Jill Bowie and Gergana Popova). Oxford University Press.
• The Handbook of English Linguistics (two editions 2006, 2021; edited with April McMahon and Lars Hinrichs). Wiley.

In addition, Aarts has published many journal articles and book chapters.

Editorial work

Aarts is a founding editor of the academic journal English Language and Linguistics, published by Cambridge University Press (with David Denison and Richard Hogg) since 1997. The journal covers both synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of English, and is a leading publication in the field.

Knowledge Transfer and consultancy

Aarts initiated the Englicious project at UCL, with Sean Wallis, a Knowledge Transfer educational platform designed to support the teaching and learning of English grammar in schools. He also teaches on a number of online Continuous Professional Development courses, e.g. English Grammar for Teachers and Teaching English Grammar in Context. He publishes on English grammar on Substack.

Aarts serves as a consultant on English grammar for the Oxford English Dictionary, and has previously served as an advisor at the UK Department for Education (DfE).

He has acted as External Quality Reviewer at many universities, including the Arab Open University, Kuwait (2012); the Lebanese American University in Beirut (2012); the University of Sheffield (2012); the University of Newcastle (2014); the American College of Thessaloniki (ACT) (2016); City University of Hong Kong (2019); the University of Nicosia (2020, 2022); the European University of Cyprus (2021, 2026); the University of Cyprus (2021, 2024); the University of Central Lancashire in Cyprus (2021); Limassol International University (2022); the University of Education Universitas Pendidikan, Indonesia (2024); Limassol College and Limassol University (2023); Universitas PGRI Semarang (2026); Universitas Islam Negeri Walisongo, Semarang (2026).

Honours and recognition

Aarts is known internationally for his contributions to English linguistics, corpus-based research, and grammar studies. He has delivered invited talks and plenary lectures at universities and conferences globally, and has held visiting appointments at universities across the world (including La Laguna, Spain (1997), Sofia, Bulgaria (1998), Zürich, Switzerland (1999), Santiago de Compostela, Spain (2000), Sarajevo and Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina (2001), Jaén, Spain (2004, 2005, 2006), Vigo, Spain (2007), Università degli Studi del Molise, Campobasso, Italy (2007), Charles-de-Gaulle Lille 3 (2010), Three Gorges University, China (2018), and Verona (2026).

He served as Vice-President (Profession) for the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE), as a member of the Council of the the Philological Society, and as Vice-Dean Enterprise for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities from 2016–2022.

He was elected a Member of the Academia Europaea in 2024.

External links

• UCL
• The Survey of English Usage
• Academia Europaea