A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically, which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural rules on speakers' or writers' usage and creation of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs and themselves, is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as:
A split infinitive is a grammatical construction in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive. In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go. Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."
Corpus linguistics is the study of a language as that language is expressed in its text corpus, its body of "real world" text. Corpus linguistics proposes that a reliable analysis of a language is more feasible with corpora collected in the field—the natural context ("realia") of that language—with minimal experimental interference. The large collections of text allow linguistics to run quantitative analyses on linguistic concepts, otherwise harder to quantify.
A Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), by Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933), is a style guide to British English usage, pronunciation, and writing. Covering topics such as plurals and literary technique, distinctions among like words, and the use of foreign terms, the dictionary became the standard for other style guides to writing in English. Hence, the 1926 first edition remains in print, along with the 1965 second edition, edited by Ernest Gowers, which was reprinted in 1983 and 1987. The 1996 third edition was re-titled as The New Fowler's Modern English Usage, and revised in 2004, was mostly rewritten by Robert W. Burchfield, as a usage dictionary that incorporated corpus linguistics data; and the 2015 fourth edition, revised and re-titled Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, was edited by Jeremy Butterfield, as a usage dictionary. Informally, readers refer to the style guide and dictionary as Fowler's Modern English Usage, Fowler, and Fowler's.
Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices often suggest that some usages are incorrect, inconsistent, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value, even in cases where such usage is more common than the prescribed usage. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use.
In the English language, there are grammatical constructions that many native speakers use unquestioningly yet certain writers call incorrect. Differences of usage or opinion may stem from differences between formal and informal speech and other matters of register, differences among dialects, and so forth. Disputes may arise when style guides disagree with each other, or when a guideline or judgement is confronted by large amounts of conflicting evidence or has its rationale challenged.
Irregardless is a word sometimes used in place of regardless or irrespective, which has caused controversy since the early twentieth century, though the word appeared in print as early as 1795.
The double copula, also known as the reduplicative copula, double is or Isis, is the usage of two successive copulae when only one is necessary, largely in spoken English. For example:
Prescription is the formulation of normative rules for language use. This article discusses the history of prescription in English. For a more general discussion, see linguistic prescription.
Fewer versus less is a debate in English grammar about the appropriate use of these two determiners. Linguistic prescriptivists usually say that fewer should be used with count nouns, and that less should be used only with mass nouns. This distinction was first made by grammarian Robert Baker in 1770, and has been promulgated by many grammarians since then. However, more recent perspectives, taking current usage into account, note that while the rule for fewer stands, the word less is used more fluidly.
Garner's Modern English Usage (GMEU), written by Bryan A. Garner and published by Oxford University Press, is a usage dictionary and style guide for contemporary Modern English. It was first published in 1998 as A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, with a focus on American English, which it retained for the next two editions as Garner's Modern American Usage (GMAU). It was expanded to cover English more broadly in the 2016 fourth edition, under the present title. The work covers issues of usage, pronunciation, and style, from distinctions among commonly confused words and phrases to notes on how to prevent verbosity and obscurity. In addition, it contains essays about the English language. An abridged version of the first edition was also published as The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style in 2000 and a similar version was published in The Chicago Manual of Style 16th edition in 2017. The latter includes three sections titled "Grammar", "Syntax" and "Word Usage", each with several subcategories.
A false, coined, fake, bogus or pseudo-title, also called a Time-style adjective and an anarthrous nominal premodifier, is a kind of appositive phrase before a noun predominantly found in journalistic writing. It formally resembles a title, in that it does not start with an article, but is a common noun phrase, not a title. An example is the phrase convicted bomber in "convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh", rather than "the convicted bomber Timothy McVeigh".
The full stop, period, or full point. is a punctuation mark used for several purposes, most often to mark the end of a declarative sentence.
This list comprises widespread modern beliefs about English language usage that are documented by a reliable source to be misconceptions.
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century is a 2014 English style guide written by cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author Steven Pinker. Building upon earlier guides, such as Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, it applies science to the process of writing, and explains its prescriptions by citing studies in related fields – e.g., grammatical phenomena, mental dynamics, and memory load – as well as history and criticism, to "distinguish the rules that enhance clarity, grace, and emotional resonance from those that are based on myths and misunderstandings".
The inanimate whose refers to the use in English of the relative pronoun whose with non-personal antecedents, as in: "That's the car whose alarm keeps waking us up at night." The construction is also known as the whose inanimate, non-personal whose, and neuter whose.
