Here is Ina Huttenga’s second blog post: The dangling participle is a pervasive structure in the English language. These “misrelated” modifiers have been used throughout English language history, but they seem to have become problems only recently, in the 20th … Continue reading →
(If this is your first time on this blog: please fill in the acceptability survey below. Thank you!) What do these features have in common? That is something Carmen Ebner and I are going to figure out in the article we … Continue reading →
The December issue of English Today contains the latest feature article from our project in which I am discussing the acceptability of the dangling participle. Here are some of the main points addressed in the article The dangling participle – a language myth?: … Continue reading →
Here is the latest feature by a member of our project in the new issue of English Today. It is republished on this blog with permission from Cambridge University Press, which owns the copyright to this piece. The original is available at Cambridge Journals Online. … Continue reading →
If you’re interested in prescriptivism, you might well want to read this recently published novel. It’s about twins who gradually grow apart, with the one thing binding them to the end being an old copy of a dictionary, probably by … Continue reading →
Every year, some time during the summer, UCL organises an English Grammar Day. This time I have been invited to speak, and I decided to do so on the following topic (not yet announced online): No complaint tradition in The Netherlands? … Continue reading →
Most of the usage problems studied by Mittins et al. in the late 1960s (Attitudes to English Usage, 1970) have since increased in acceptability. This is what we tested by repeating their survey in the form of usage polls on this … Continue reading →
Ina Huttenga is the next student from the MA course Testing Prescriptivism to present her first blog post: What I have here in my bookcase is The Wadsworth Handbook, a manual for students about writing. I use it mainly for citing … Continue reading →
What do try and, only, split infinitives and dangling participles have in common? This is a question we asked a few weeks ago, and I promised to let you know as soon as we found out. Here, then, is a partial answer … Continue reading →
We have dealt with numerous language issues such as the oddly misplaced apostrophe, the dangling participle and the new “like” on our blog, but what interests me in particular are the social factors that may or may not pull the strings behind the scene. … Continue reading →
