Courses
Courses for students interested in the Codifiers project
BA courses
First semester 2009-2010:
- Introduction to Early Modern English
- Introduction to Early Modern English - Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
MA courses
First semester:
- Normative Linguistics: the case of Fowler - Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
- Course description: Since its publication in 1926, “Fowler” has developed into a household name. Two revised editions of Modern English Usage have appeared (1965, 1996), and this year, the first edition is reissued in the Oxford World’s Classics series with an introduction by David Crystal. Yet the book is a controversial publication: it is either hailed as a most useful guide to linguistic correctness or it is despised because of its aim to impose a norm of correctness on the language user. Why is this the case? Why was Fowler so popular ? How influential were his prescriptions on actual usage? How prescriptive were they to begin with? These are questions we will deal with during the course. Fowler was part of a tradition that has its origins during the final stage of the standardisation process of the English language, i.e. prescription, and it is striking to see that many of the strictures he dealt with were already 150 years old. The question is whether attitudes to these strictures changed over the years and to what extent they are still similar today. Work done during the course will contribute to a database on usage problems that is in the process of being compiled, each of which, as we will discover, has its own little history.