ABSTRACT
The pioneering aspect of the Survey of English Usage corpus (SEU) was the inclusion of informal conversational material: with the advent of the tape-recorder it had become possible to record and thus to study comprehensively ‘the most natural form of language and the one that is most overwhelmingly dominant for any individual in whatever walk of life’ (Svartvik and Quirk 1980: 9) as had not been the case for earlier grammarians such as Poutsma, Kruisinga and Jespersen. The SEU was set up to collect a million words of English as used by adult educated native speakers of British English in as complete a variety of registers as could be conceived when the project was begun at the University of Durham in 1959: material includes love letters and scientific lectures, sermons and coffee-break chat. The SEU moved to University College London in 1960, and the collection of data was finally completed nearly 30 years later. During that time it provided a fund of authentic language-data from which examples could be drawn to support language-theories: much of the research subsequently based on it 1 can truly be said to have been data-driven.
