It’s the 26th of September and that means that it’s the European Day of Languages. On the eve of the closing event of the “European Year of Languages” (2001) the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe declared a “European Day of … Continue reading
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The project Bridging the Unbridgeable’s Monthly Lunch Lecture is very proud to present: A Database of English Usage Guides & Usage Problems Since historical (socio-) linguists of the English language have begun to study the topic of usage, there has been … Continue reading
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Last week, the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics was held at Zürich University in Switzerland. On Monday afternoon, the conference was opened with a word of welcome by the president of the university Andreas Fischer, who is also an English historical … Continue reading
This August, we will be bridging the unbridgeable at the 17th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in Zürich, Switzerland (click image to conference website). We will convene an informal meeting to discuss the public discourse on usage & normativism … Continue reading
In our usage polls we use the same criteria of acceptability as those of the survey from which they are taken, Mittins et al.’s Attitudes to English Usage. We ask you to rate usage items according to whether they are … Continue reading
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Kingsley Amis distinguishes two types of people in his amusing usage guide The King’s English based on their attitudes and usage: berks & wankers. These terms he quite obviously uses in absolutely nothing else but their most strictly technical sense as … Continue reading
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Being asked to review the Collins online dictionary reminded me of my vocabulary classes as a first-year student at the department of English language & literature at the University of Amsterdam nearly 20 years ago. We had to study concordance … Continue reading
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A little while ago we received an e-mail from the Collins Language Team with the request to review the beta version of their new free online dictionary. Although this is clearly part of a strategy of buzz marketing, I am … Continue reading
I just found out this week that linguists at University College London have developed an app called interactive Grammar of English (iGE). The app is based on the British Component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) developed by the … Continue reading
I was just thinking how different levels of prescriptiveness, different models of correctness are implemented on different genres or text types. Why for instance is the clipped language of newspaper headlines not considered ‘wrong’ while such usage would be criticised … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 