Category Archives: Uncategorized

Children in a world of prescriptivists

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Lonneke van Leest-Kootkar is one of the few students from my Testing Prescriptivism course who still has a second blogpost to publish. As you will see, she is also the mother of two small children: The inspiration for this blogpost … Continue reading →

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English Today: just out

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Our latest contribution to English Today was written by Hielke Vriesendorp, a research master student at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics with an interest in prescriptivism. His paper is called “The Internet’s (New) Usage Problems”, and its aim is … Continue reading →

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You should not borrow that!

Posted on June 9, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is Sara Sánchez-Molina Santos’s second blog post: Should we blame on language users the borrowing of words from other languages? Are speakers mistaken when they borrow words that are apparently already present in the language? Is this a new phenomenon? … Continue reading →

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Grammar obsessions

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

Here is an excellent linguist’s view (structural ambiguity intended) on the controversial UK SPaG test that Carmen Ebner wrote about on this blog a short while ago. Three days ago, Jane Hodson from the University of Sheffield published an online … Continue reading →

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New writer for the blog

Posted on April 20, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

I’m very pleased to be able to introduce a new member of our team of blog writers: Adrian Stenton. Adrian was the copy-editor of my book The Bishop’s Grammar (OUP, 2011), with which he did a really great job. After that, he weas one … Continue reading →

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Running the unrunnable

Posted on April 18, 2016 by Morana Lukač

On Friday (April 15) part of our research team participated in the 41st Singelloop in Leiden — the annual road running event (ca 7 km) around the canals of Leiden. We were part of a team of linguists from Leiden University. … Continue reading →

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The -isms around the prescriptiv- …

Posted on March 31, 2016 by Ingrid Tieken

… and how they are (almost) non-apparent in Dutch Here is Merijn Kooijman’s first blogpost: Although no prescriptivist will probably ever admit this, prescriptivism is often just a cog in the machine. Obtaining perfect linguistic purity always seems to be … Continue reading →

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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 →

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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 →

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Season’s Greetings

Posted on December 22, 2015 by Ingrid Tieken

We wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – hoping to receive as many comments from you as ever! To end with a “fun fact”: did you know that most Christmas cards feature animals? And so … Continue reading →

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