Linguistics & Language · Sociolinguistics
A topic within Sociolinguistics, itself one of 10 topics in that field and part of Linguistics & Language.
2 works
H. W. Fowler
Lays out judgments on disputed points of English usage, defending careful distinctions between similar words as aids to clear thought, and became the model prescriptive work that later descriptivist linguistics defines itself against.
Geoffrey K. Pullum
Argues that decades of usage advice condemning the passive voice consistently misidentify ordinary active sentences as passive, showing that the rule is applied by writers who cannot correctly recognise the construction they are attacking.
link checked 17 Sept 2026