Author Archives: Morana Lukač

11th Bridging the Unbridgeable Lunch Lecture

Posted on May 13, 2015 by Morana Lukač

We are pleased to announce our 11th Bridging the Unbridgeable Lunch Lecture taking place on 28 May 2015, from 12 to 1 pm at Lipsius, room 148. This time we will be crossing language borders to hear about linguistic metadiscourses … Continue reading →

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#Fundilymundily the language of the UK general election 2015

Posted on May 11, 2015 by Morana Lukač

With the UK general election just behind us, the talk of the language used in the debates still lies ahead. Last night, on the grammar phone-in of the BBC Radio 5’s Up All Night, the presenter Dotun Adebayo discussed the … Continue reading →

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Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Morana Lukač

Editors and language advice seem to go hand in hand. When in doubt about language matters, who better to consult than those whose job description includes improving style, formatting, and proofreading.  Mary Norris of The New Yorker has joined the … Continue reading →

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10th Bridging the Unbridgeable Lunch Lecture

Posted on March 31, 2015 by Morana Lukač

We are pleased to announce our 10th Bridging the Unbridgeable Lunch Lecture which will take place on 15 April 2015, from 12 to 1 pm at Lipsius, room 227. Our guest speaker, David Lorenz from the University of Freiburg will … Continue reading →

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Halting language change: Wikipedia Grammar Vigilante

Posted on February 16, 2015 by Morana Lukač

Grammar vigilantes are not a novelty. Perhaps one of the best-publicized grammar crusades was the Great Typo Hunt, a nationwide mission by two young Americans who corrected hundreds of public typos during a three-month road trip and were imprisoned as … Continue reading →

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The future of English

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Morana Lukač

At the turn of the calendar year, we are usually making (soon-to-be-broken) resolutions and speculating about the future. It comes as no surprise that linguists have been exchanging their views on the future of English in the previous weeks, John … Continue reading →

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Miracles of Human Language

Posted on November 21, 2014 by Morana Lukač

We are excited to announce the new online linguistics course offered by Prof. Marc van Oostendorp from Leiden University. The course is designed as an introduction for anyone interested in how language works and how it gives insight into the … Continue reading →

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Railway station or train station?

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Morana Lukač

One of the pet peeves of the British English-speaking language pedants has traditionally been the usage of Americanisms, which we have written and surveyed our readers about in our previous posts. In my research of the complaints about language use, … Continue reading →

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A page from the history of linguistics

Posted on October 6, 2014 by Morana Lukač

In the next couple of months, I will be conducting research on diachronic changes in English usage at the University of Freiburg by looking into the “Brown family” of corpora. The Brown Corpus of Standard American English was the first … Continue reading →

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Farewell to Geoffrey Leech

Posted on August 27, 2014 by Morana Lukač

This month, Geoffrey Leech, the eminent Professor and the founder of the Department of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, passed away. Due to his major contributions to the fields of corpus linguistics, stylistics, pragmatics and semantics, as well … Continue reading →

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