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Author Archives: Ingrid Tieken
Normative linguistics, 25 years on: the presentation
Those of you who are interested might like to watch our presentation during the ISLE Online Forum of 20 November, organised by Yoko Iyeiri – with great thanks to her for making it all happen. You will find the presentation … Continue reading
Hun or hen? A Dutch shibboleth hitting the news
Hun and hen: these are third person plural pronouns in Dutch, but the distinction – hun for indirect object and hen for direct object – is hard to remember (for me it definitely is). And anyway, the distinction was only … Continue reading
Posted in Dutch prescriptivism, news, usage features
Tagged Dutch prescriptivism, Dutch usage advice, hun/hen, shibboleths
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Congratulations, Dr Stenton!
Yesterday, Adrian Stenton obtained his PhD degree from the University of Leiden. His thesis is called These Kind of Words: Number agreement in the species noun phrase in International Academic English. The thesis was published Open Access by LOT, and … Continue reading
Posted in announcement, news, usage features, usage guide
Tagged prescriptivism, usage guides
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Vernacular norms (guest post by Joan Beal)
August 1 is Yorkshire day and, right on cue, a link to a BBC news item about Yorkshire dialect arrived in a WhatsApp message from my daughter Alice, who lives in Sheffield: New signs drawn up after council apostrophe error. … Continue reading
HUGE 2.0, or …?
Filled with happy academic memories of the 7th Prescriptivism Conference organised by Linda Pillière and her team at the University of Aix Marseille towards the end of last month! The papers were all very interesting, the plenarists (Nuria Yañez-Bouza, Jane … Continue reading
On who/whom in popular culture
Just out, I wrote earlier today, New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research, and in it there is an article I wrote on the exploitation of who/whom as a usage problem in popular culture: television series, films, popular novels. And here is … Continue reading
Posted in polls and surveys, usage features
Tagged prescriptivism, Richard Osman, Thursday Murder CLub, who/whom
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Out now – another very interesting book on prescriptivism
Congratulations, editors Nuria Yañez-Bouza, María Esther Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra! You did a great job editing and publishing the proceedings of the 6th Prescriptivism conference held at Vigo in 2021. The book can now be ordered from Multilingual Matters, on … Continue reading
Singular ‘they’ in Dutch?
“Will everyone put down their phone?” is quite common in English today. It has been around as a construction since at least the 14th century, developed into quite a controversial feature in the language, but as our Usage poll #10 … Continue reading
Posted in Dutch prescriptivism, news, usage features
Tagged Dutch prescriptivism, singular they
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Bridging the Unbridgeable 
On Richard Osman and his editors
So I’ve finally read them all, all four of Richard Osman‘s The Thursday Murder Club crime novels. Not in the order in which they were published, due to their availability in our public library (so that in the end I … Continue reading →