Filled with happy academic memories of the 7th Prescriptivism Conference organised by Linda Pillière and her team at the University of Aix Marseille towards the end of last month! The papers were all very interesting, the plenarists (Nuria Yañez-Bouza, Jane Hodson and Ian Cushing) very well chosen, and it was great to meet academic friends of long standing (in person once again) and to make new ones in the process. There are plans for publishing the proceedings (Multilingual Matters has already shown interest), and the next conference on the subject will be held in Brussels, to be organised by Rik Vosters and colleagues. Looking forward to it already!

One of the papers was particularly interesting from the perspective of the Bridging the Unbridgeable project. It only came on towards the end, so there was little time to exchange views and experiences, but it was fascinating to see how it drew on our HUGE database but dealt with styleguides rather than usage guides. These are text types which we took great care to distinguish in our project, not only because there are so many of them but also because they are expected to have exerted a different kind of influence on users and their language use. Style guides are used obligatorily, whereas usage guides are only consulted at the need of the individual user. There is nevertheless a great deal of overlap between them.

The style guide project is run by Holly Baker from Brigham Young University, and it owes a debt, she noted in her paper, to the HUGE database. It will also be freely accessible, she said and should already be available (if I remember correctly) by the end of next year. Her co-presenter at the conference was Liana Jankovich (not mentioned on the conference programme, but apparently a student from Brigham Young University as I found by googling her), who presented some preliminary results from an analysis of the use of metalangistic terms in the database. I expect considerable overlap with data on this subject from usage guides (see my book Describing Presciptivism, chapter 6) or from normative grammars from the eighteenth century, which is where the roots of prescriptivism can be found (see The Bishop’s Grammar, chapter 4). So I’ll be following this fascinating project with great interest!