Peters Pam. The Cambridge Guide to English Usage

Cambridge University Press, 2004. — xii, 608 pages. — ISBN13: 978-0-511-19563-1.The Cambridge Guide to English Usage is an A–Z reference book, giving an up-to-date account of the debatable issues of English usage and written style. Its advice draws a wealth of recent research and data from very large corpora of American and British English – illuminating their many divergences and also points of convergence on which international English can be based. The book comprises more than 4000 points of word meaning, spelling, grammar, punctuation and larger issues of inclusive language, and effective writing and argument. It also provides guidance on grammatical terminology, and covers topics in electronic communication and the internet. The discussion notes the major dictionaries, grammars and usage books in the US, UK, Canada and Australia, allowing readers to calibrate their own practices as required. CGEU is descriptive rather than prescriptive, but offers a principled basis for implementing progressive or more conservative decisions on usage.The Cambridge Guide to English Usageis the first of its kind to make regular use of large databases (corpora) of computerized texts as primary sources of current English. Numerous examples of British usage have come from the 100 million word British National Corpus (seeBNC); and of American usage from a subset of 140 million words of American English from the Cambridge International Corpus (seeCCAE). The corpora embody various kinds of written discourse as well as transcriptions of spoken discourse – enough to show patterns of divergence between the two. Negative attitudes to particular idioms or usage often turn on the fact that they are more familiar to the ear than the eye, and the constructions of formal writing are privileged thereby. Corpus data allow us to look more neutrally at the distributions of words and constructions, to view the range of styles across which they operate. On this basis we can see what is really “standard,” i.e. usable in many kinds of discourse, as opposed to the formal or informal. References to “formal” and “informal” within the book presuppose that they lie above and below the broad band of everyday written communication, and together form a three-point stylistic scale.A to Z EntriesInternational Phonetic Alphabet Symbols for English Sounds
Geological Eras
Perpetual Calendar 1901–2008
International System of Units (SI Units)
Interconversion Tables for Metric and Imperial Measures
Selected Proofreading Marks
Formats and Styles for Letters, Memos and E-mail
Layout for Envelopes
Currencies of the World