It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Emeritus Professor Jan Svartvik, Lund University, Sweden.
Jan was born on 18 August 1931 in the county of Värmland in Sweden and died in Lund on 18 June 2024. He studied at Uppsala and University College London (UCL) and became Professor of English Language at Lund University in 1970, a chair he held for 25 years till his retirement.
Jan is well-known for his early and innovative development of machine-readable corpora in collaboration with the Survey of English Usage at UCL, in particular the world’s first spoken corpus, London–Lund Corpus of spoken British English, launched in the mid-1970s.
He wrote many books and articles, both single-authored publications and publications in collaboration with colleagues. Best-known of them all is perhaps the impressive Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985), which he co-authored with Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum and Geoffrey Leech. This grammar book is still one of the standard reference grammars of English. He was also known for working with Geoffrey Leech on A Communicative Grammar of English (third edition, 2002), English: One Tongue, Many Voices (2006).
Jan played a leading role in the foundation of ICAME, the International Computer Archive of Medieval and Modern English, which he co-founded in 1977. ICAME grew into an important international organisation with a focus on the computational analysis of the English language. It has an annual conference which attracts scholars from all over the world. https://icame.info/history-the-beginnings/,
Jan’s autobiography is here http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/about/svartvik.htm
Carita Paradis Bas Aarts
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Professor Carita Paradis, PhD, MAE
Centre for Languages and Literature Lund University
Box 201, SE-221 00 Lund
Website:http://www.sol.lu.se/en/person/CaritaParadis
[1664519590158]https://projekt.ht.lu.se/llc2
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