Andreea Calude • Jan 24, 2020 •
I’ve been listening to a wonderful podcast this morning which left me thinking. The podcast was a 30-min well-spent break, in the company of Daniel Midgley and Michael Gordin. You might know Daniel Midgley from the Talk the Talk linguistics podcast. Michael Gordin is the author of “Scientific Babel”, which concerns the history of how English came … Read More
Andreea Calude • May 20, 2019 •
An innocent turn of phrase….or is it? If you are David Cameron, you will have by now learnt that size nouns used in SIZE NOUN + OF + NOUN constructions can get one in a whole bunch of hot water (well…maybe not the exact terminology but the idea behind it at least)! In 2016, he had the misfortune of Twitting the … Read More
Andreea Calude • May 08, 2018 •
This post was originally published on The Spinoff. The emphasis placed on formal written grammar in schools obscures the fact that English has many kinds of grammar – and they’re all equally valid, writes Waikato University senior lecturer in linguistics, Andreea Calude. “But don’t you want your kids to get a job one day?” There are almost 200 people … Read More
Andreea Calude • Mar 16, 2018 •
Andreea S. Calude, University of Waikato This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article. My grammar checker and I are on a break. Due to irreconcilable differences, we are no longer on speaking terms. It all started when it became dead set on putting commas before every single “which”. Despite all the … Read More
Guest Author • Feb 02, 2018 •
By Dr Nicola Daly Often when we hear someone speak, we start making inferences about the characteristics and personality of the person. There is a considerable body of research concerning language attitudes which shows, for example, that when we hear a person speaking with a Received Pronunciation or RP British English accent (also known as the Queen’s … Read More