Author Archives: Ingrid Tieken

Smaug, the Stupendous

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

This semester, I teach an MA course called Testing Prescriptivism. Part of the requirements for the course, as for earlier courses I taught on the subject, is that students write two blogposts each. Here is the first, by Bram Steijn: … Continue reading →

Posted in MA Leiden, usage features | 3 Comments

No Dutch complaint tradition?

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

In their book Authority in Language, Milroy and Milroy write that English has a well-established “complaint tradition” and that such a tradition is “typically found in communities that have highly developed standard languages” (2012: 39). But how about Dutch? In contrast … Continue reading →

Posted in letters to the editor | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Splitting only

Posted on February 18, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

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 →

Posted in polls and surveys, usage features | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Of pedants, mavens, sticklers and …

Posted on February 9, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

… only-snoopers! This is a term adopted by Sir Ernest Gowers in his discussion of the placement of only in Plain Words, another old chestnut in the usage guide tradition. The term reminds me of which-hunting, something pedants and other prescriptivists are renowned … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features, usage guide | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Age of Prescriptivism

Posted on January 29, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Last week, at the symposium  The Effects of Prescriptivism in Language History organised at the University of Leiden Centre for Linguistics by Gijsbert Rutten and Marijke van der Wal, I presented a paper called The Age of Prescriptivism. For the paper … Continue reading →

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Try and, only, split infinitives, dangling participles

Posted on January 27, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

(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 →

More Galleries | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Please help us with our usage polls!

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

If you can spare us a little of your time, and if you haven’t done so already, please take our fifth usage poll. If you do so, we will be able to study the difference in acceptability compared between when Mittins … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Drownded: read drowned

Posted on January 12, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Perhaps the most interesting irregular verb form I found in my analyse of the usage guides in HUGE (for a paper I’m giving next week on the topic) is drownded. The only usage guide in the HUGE database that mentions … Continue reading →

Posted in usage features | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Happy birthday, Janet Whitcut!

Posted on January 7, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Though none of us in the Bridging the Unbridgeable project has ever met Janet Whitcut, her work is nevertheless very important to us. Janet is the author, together with Sidney Greenbaum, of The Longman Guide to English Usage (1988). Jointly, they … Continue reading →

Posted in news, usage guide | Tagged | 3 Comments

Irregular verbs in English usage guides

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

For a paper I’m giving in January at the Leiden conference The Effects of Prescriptivism in Language History, I decided to look at strong verbs, or rather at the larger category of irregular verbs. Two questions for our readers: how … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 7 Comments