Prestigious Fellowship for Ingrid Tieken
Professor Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade has been awarded a fellowship at Clare College at the University of Cambridge from February to August 2011. She will use the opportunity to pursue her research on the relationship between the history of grammar writing and actual usage.
New project on usage guides
This fellowship will allow Tieken to initiate work on her new project focusing on the many English usage guides that were produced in the eighteenth century following on from the codification of the English language. She aims to assess the effectiveness of these usage guides by contrasting usage strictures proposed by prescriptive grammarians with actual usage. Normative grammar writing is frowned upon by modern linguists, and Tieken is also interested in investigating the reasons behind this.