If you are not a native speaker English, like myself, these are difficult issues. According to Burchfield’s third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996), the one is characteristic of American English and the other of British English. (Fowler himself … Continue reading
The linguistic error was invented during the Renaissance. This will be one of the topics of a paper by the Dutch linguist Joop van der Horst on Saturday, at a public symposium organised by the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. … Continue reading
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In David Crystal’s Encyclopedia of the English Language (p. 196), Fowler is portrayed in his swimsuit, and so he is in the OxfordWords blog “From telegraphese to texting: one hundred years of the Concise Oxford Dictionary“. I’ve always wondered why: after all, … Continue reading
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The Bishop’s Grammar (OUP, 2011) was reviewed in last week’s Times Literary Supplement. One of the aims of my book was to show that Robert Lowth is usually depicted as an icon of prescriptivism, and also that his Short Introduction to English … Continue reading
Kate Wild, one of our contributors, has kindly lent us two copies of her usage guides: anon., A Dictionary of Daily Blunders. London: Whittaker & Co (1880) anon. Many Mistakes Mended. New York: N. Tibbals & Sons (1886). The first of this … Continue reading
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In a park in Ealing, London (was it Ealing Common?) we came upon this notice: The arrival and that of their descendant’s have changed the face of Ealing and England forever. If you look carefully, someone tried to erase the … Continue reading
Whether more linguists are getting interested in prescriptivism is hard to say as I have no baseline data so to speak. But during the Helsinki Corpus Festival the term prescriptivism occurred quite a number of times. To begin with, there … Continue reading
The question whether phrasal verbs are typical of informal usage was raised by Paula Rodríguez-Puente at the Helsinki Corpus Festival yesterday. The title of her paper was “”Talking ‘private’ with phrasal verbs: A corpus-based study of English phrasal verbs from 1650 to … Continue reading
This was how David Denison (Manchester), in a paper jointly presented at the Helsinki Corpus Festival with Marianne Hundt (Zurich), described the American phobia for which in non-restrictive relative clauses. American users are advised to “use that before a restrictive clause and which before … Continue reading
Today, Geoffrey Leech (University of Lancaster) gave a plenary lecture at the Helsinki Corpus Festival, called “Decline and (?)disappearance: The negative side of recent changes in Standard English”. One of his examples of recent change was the loss of the … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 