English Usage Guides: History, Advice, Attitudes

This volume explores both historical and current issues in English usage guides or style manuals. Guides of this sort have a long history: while Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) is one of the best known, the first English usage guide was published in the UK in 1770, and the first in the US in 1847. Today, new titles come out nearly every year, while older works are revised and reissued. Remarkably, however, the kind of usage problems that have been addressed over the years are very much the same, and attitudes towards them are slow to change - but they do change. The chapters in this book look at how and why these guides are compiled, and by whom; what sort of advice they contain; how they differ from grammars and dictionaries; how attitudes to usage change; and why institutions such as the BBC need their own style guide. The volume will appeal not only to researchers and students in sociolinguistics, but also to general readers with an interest in questions of usage and prescriptivism, language professionals such as teachers and editors, and language policy makers.

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and has a chair in English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. Her research interests include the final stages of English standardization - the codification of grammar and the rise and spread of prescriptivism - and the question of how grammar rules relate to actual usage. Her published work includes An Introduction to Late Modern English (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), and, with OUP, The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism (2011) and In Search ofJane Austen: The Language of the Letters (2014).