Language Use, Usage Guides and Linguistic Norms

Luisella Caon is Lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She wrote her PhD thesis on “Authorial or Scribal?: Spelling variation in the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales” at the same institution in 2009. Her main research interests are palaeography, codicology and Middle English language. She is an expert in the field of spelling variants in Medieval English manuscripts, with a special focus on fifteenth-century texts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.Marion Elenbaas is Lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She received a PhD on the diachronic development of English verb-particle combinations from Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Her main research interests include English synchronic and diachronic syntax, especially secondary predication and the impact of internal and external factors on syntactic change.Janet Grijzenhout holds the Chair of English Linguistics at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She has taught phonology, morphology, the history of the English language, first and second language acquisition, and comparative linguistics for more than 25 years. Her research group focuses on the morphophonology of Germanic languages, the history of West-Germanic sound systems and bilingual language acquisition.