Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English - Hardcover

Van Ostade, Ingrid Tieken-Boon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0367207184 ISBN 13: 9780367207182

Publisher: Routledge, 2019

Synopsis

Describing Prescriptivism provides a topical and thought-provoking analysis of linguistic prescriptivism in British and American English, from a historical as well as present-day perspective. Focusing on usage guides and usage problems, the book takes a three-fold approach to present an in-depth analysis of the topic, featuring:

• a detailed study of the advice provided in usage guides over the years;

• an authoritative comparison of this advice with actual usage as recorded in British and American corpora, including the HUGE (Hyper Usage Guide of English) database – developed specifically to enable this line of study – as well as more mainstream corpora such as COCA, COHA and the BNC;

• a close analysis of the attitudes to particular usage problems among the general public, based on surveys distributed online through the "Bridging the Unbridgeable" research project’s blog.*

With extensive case studies to illustrate and support claims throughout, this comprehensive study is key reading for students and researchers of prescriptivism, the history of English and sociolinguistics.

*Found at https://bridgingtheunbridgeable.com/

About this title

About the Author

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is Chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics, University of Leiden, The Netherlands, and has published extensively on the latter end of the English standardisation process.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0367207184
• ISBN 13: 9780367207182
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288