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R.W. Burchfield (1923-2004) was not only the author of the third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage – which Wikipedia labels as a “controversial, substantially rewritten and less prescriptivist” version of the book: he was also responsible for the second Supplement of the … Continue reading
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Being asked to review the Collins online dictionary reminded me of my vocabulary classes as a first-year student at the department of English language & literature at the University of Amsterdam nearly 20 years ago. We had to study concordance … Continue reading
One of the polls a while ago asked your opinion about this sentence: Traditional and CONTEMPORARY furniture do not go well together. But when we were discussing this sentence during a project meeting the other day, we couldn’t really work … Continue reading
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Peter Tiersma, in a chapter called “The Legal Lexicon”, notes: In American English, shall has become virtually obsolete, so that the sole future modal verb is will (Tiersma 1999:105). Is this indeed the case? Do copy editors allow “I will” … Continue reading
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Last week I was reminded of the usefulness of Boolean operators by Ewoud Sanders’ booklet on eResearch which is available (in Dutch) here. Because it is often possible to find enough relevant information using simple search queries, I sometimes forget the … Continue reading
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The previous post quoted an example from Lindley Murray’s English Grammar to illustrate that restrictive relative clauses are not separated from the antecedent by a comma: A man who is of a detractory spirit, will misconstrue … (1795:164). Lyda Fens-de Zeeuw, a specialist … Continue reading
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Elsewhere in this blog (search for: “A which hunt”), I referred to the different prescriptions for usage of which and that in British and American English. The American advice to “use that before a restrictive clause and which before everything else” suggests that that is … Continue reading
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Working with WordSmith Tools As the first in a regular lecture series we will be organising, the project Bridging the Unbridgeable offers a demonstration of the concordancing program WordSmith Tools, designed by Mike Scott from theUniversity of Liverpool. This program … Continue reading
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In a recent blog, the question was raised when objections against sentences starting with a conjunction were first formulated, and one of the commenters, Steven Leefers, suggested it must have been around the Interbellum. So thanks to Steven for sorting … Continue reading
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One of my (British) colleagues the other day mentioned that his sixteen-year-old daughter was very much surprised to learn that of in could of was not a preposition but an auxiliary verb. (For clarity’s sake, the girl’s father is a linguist and … Continue reading
Bridging the Unbridgeable 