Author Archives: Morana Lukač

The future of English

Posted on January 23, 2015

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

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

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

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

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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Read all about it! Our third feature in English Today

Posted on August 15, 2014

In the latest issue of English Today I briefly address the history of the possessive apostrophe, the most notorious punctuation mark in the English language. Here are some interesting facts from the article: Did you know that the apostrophe was first … Continue reading →

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Can ‘Cheers!’ be inappropriate? The story of email sign-offs

Posted on August 1, 2014

In one of our previous posts Ingrid Tieken wrote about her analysis of commonly used email sign-offs she found while going through her inbox. (To find out more about the differences she found between American, British and non-native email authors, … Continue reading →

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