Author Archives: Ingrid Tieken

Febuary, febry

Posted on June 17, 2018

‘Last February? Last February? Oh yes, I was here last February.’ He [the janitor]  pronounced it exactly as spelled.’  (p. 236) The passage is from Raymond Chandler‘s novel The Little Sister (1949). When I came across this metalinguistic comment, I was wondering … Continue reading →

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Guess what?! You don’t just speak a dialect; you’re also illiterate and uneducated!

Posted on May 1, 2018

And here is Ilse Stolte’s second blogpost, on a topic related to the first one she wrote about: For the course on Non-Standard English and prescriptivism, I spend a great deal of time reading through entries of usage guides in … Continue reading →

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Hisself: should we allow it or not?

Posted on April 30, 2018

And here is another blogpost from one of my MA students. Maha Khalil would like to know why the non-standard reflexive pronoun hisself remains non-standard today. The blogpost was inspired …  … by an article published by the Scottish writer … Continue reading →

Posted in polls and surveys, usage features | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Three more project publications!

Posted on April 20, 2018

Just out: Standardising English: Norms and Margins in the History of the English Language, ed. by Linda Pillière, Wilfred Andrieu, Valérie Kerfelec and Diana Lewis (2018), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carmen Ebner, Concepts of correctness and acceptability in British English: … Continue reading →

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Dialect or simply illiterate?

Posted on April 16, 2018

Ilse Stolte needs to write blogposts for my course Non-Standard English (and prescriptivism) as well. Here is the first one, and one with a request to our readers to fill in a survey on the acceptability of two stigmatised language … Continue reading →

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How do the Dutch feel about non-standard features of English?

Posted on April 13, 2018

Here is Michèle Huisman’s first blogpost, and she too is doing a survey for her paper in the course Non-standard English which I’m teaching. So please help her collect data for her upcoming presentation! In 2017, The Netherlands came first … Continue reading →

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A centenary: The Elements of Style

Posted on April 12, 2018

Putting the final touches (I hope!) to my book on usage guides and usage problems,  I suddenly realised that William Strunk‘s famous Elements of Style is a hundred years old this year. Will anyone, publisher or critic or otherwise, pay attention to … Continue reading →

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