For anyone who wants to become a more effective writer, a more perceptive reader, and a more precise thinker, an understanding of English sentence structure is indispensable. This book shows you how to begin. Using clear and engaging examples from English, it introduces the basic concepts of syntactic structure to readers with no background in linguistics. Starting with simple, familiar phrases, and progressing to more complex sentences, it builds on what we already intuitively know, to pr...

Syntax: Basic Concepts and Applications provides a systematic introduction to core topics in syntax, focusing on how the basic concepts apply in the analysis of sentences. Assuming no background in linguistic analysis, the book gives students a working knowledge of syntactic analysis from a minimalist perspective. Step by step it explains the fundamentals of phrase structure, movement and deletion. Well-placed exercises throughout reinforce and extend the concepts and analyses presented in...

Generative Grammar presents a substantial contribution to the field of linguistics in drawing together for the first time the author's most significant work on the theory of generative grammar.The essays collected here display Freidin's role in moving the theory forward in terms of new proposals, and analyse the efforts to understand the evolution and history of the theory by careful investigation of how and why it has changed over the years.

This festschrift volume brings together important contributions by expert syntacticians across the globe on tense and finiteness, adjectives, dative and ergative case, acquisition of case, and other topics both within the domain of Dravidian linguistics and in the broader theoretical understanding of cross-linguistic data. Professor R. Amritavalli, a renowned linguist, has spent over three decades in the fields of syntax and syntactic acquisition, making important and landmark contribution...

Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of synta...

Many people find English grammar daunting: if you are one of them, then this is the book for you. The Complete Guide to Grammar is an indispensible guide for all native English speakers who were not taught formal grammar, and who have ever wondered about the correct use of a word or phrase. It is also an invaluable learning tool for students of English of lower intermediate standard and above.The book deals with each area of grammar in a concise, readable manner, providing relevant...

First published in 1978, Reading Greek has become a best-selling one-year introductory course in ancient Greek for students and adults. It combines the best of modern and traditional language-learning techniques and is used widely in schools, summer schools and universities across the world. It has also been translated into several foreign languages. This volume contains a narrative adapted entirely from ancient authors, including Herodotus, Euripides, Aristophanes and Demosthenes, in orde...

First published in 1997, this book addresses the question: What is the interpretation of English there-existential construction? One of the principal goals is to develop an interpretation for the construction that will specifically address other properties of the postcopular DP. After outlining the problem, the author goes on to present a syntactic motivation for the claim that the postcopular DP is the sole complement to the existential predicate, as well as for the claim that th...

With more than 50 years of teaching experience between them, Ilse Depraetere and Chad Langford present a grammar pitched precisely at advanced learners of English who need to understand how the English language really works without getting lost in the complex specifics.Now fully updated and revised throughout, the second edition of this book pulls from linguistic theory all the relevant notions that will enable the language student to fully grasp English grammar. After introducing ...

Everything you need to know about the 25 essential rules of English grammar.English grammar is often said to be over-complicated and difficult to get to grips with but the truth is that, while there are certain rules that should be obeyed, the language evolves and develops over time – and quite rightly so.In this useful book, Joseph Piercy outlines the 25 rules that should be adhered to in written and spoken English, defining the rules themselves and then d...

Highly readable and eminently practical, Syntactic Analysis: The Basics focuses on bringing students with little background in linguistics up to speed on how modern syntactic analysis works.A succinct and practical introduction to understanding sentence structure, ideal for students who need to get up to speed on key concepts in the fieldIntroduces readers to the central terms and concepts in syntaxOffers a hands-on approach to understanding and p...

Variation within the English language is a vast research area, of which dialectology, the study of geographic variation, is a significant part. This book explores grammatical differences between British English dialects, drawing on authentic speech data collected in over thirty counties. In doing so it presents a new approach known as 'corpus-based dialectometry', which focuses on the joint quantitative measurement of dozens of grammatical features to gauge regional differences. These feat...