Language is primarily a tool for communication, yet many textbooks still treat English grammar as simply a set of rules and facts to be memorised by rote. This new textbook is made for students who are frustrated with this approach and would like instead to understand grammar and how it works. Why are there two future tenses in English? What are auxiliaries and why are they so confusing? Why are English motion verbs hard to use? Why are determiners so important in English? These and many o...

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 ...

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...

This book presents a comprehensive description of collocation, covering both the theoretical and practical background and the implications and applications of the concept as language model and analytical tool. It provides a definitive survey of currently available techniques and a detailed description of their implementation.

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...

The third edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics is an authoritative and invaluable reference source covering every aspect of its wide-ranging field. In 3,250 entries the Dictionary spans grammar, phonetics, semantics, languages (spoken and written), dialects, and sociolinguistics. Clear examples - and diagrams where appropriate - help to convey the meanings of even the most technical terms. It also incorporates entries on key scholars of linguistics, bot...

In this original study, Hilde Hasselgård discusses the use of adverbials in English, through examining examples found in everyday texts. Adverbials - clause elements that typically refer to circumstances of time, space, reason and manner - cover a range of meanings and can be placed at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a sentence. The description of the frequency of meaning types and discussion of the reasons for selecting positions show that the use of adverbials differs acros...

The languages of mainland Southeast Asia evidence an impressive array of elaborate grammatical resources, such as echo words, phonaesthetic words, chameleon affixes, chiming derivatives, onomatopoeic forms, ideophones and expressives. Speakers of these languages fashion grammatical works of art in order to express and convey emotions, senses, conditions and perceptions that enrich discourse. This book provides a detailed comparative overview of the mechanisms by which aesthetic qualities o...

First published in 1991, this book looks at tense in English, one of the most controversial areas of grammar. Prior to the book’s original publication, the problems and interest in the subject had led to an impressive number of books and articles. Yet, despite the amount of work produced, nothing approaching a consensus had emerged, merely a series of conflicting theories and analyses. Here, Renaat Declerck provides a framework for a theoretical instrument which will enable the linguist to...

This book grew out of a concern we have had that very many theoretical and descriptive work on the Kwa languages were not accessible to the general linguistic community. As a result, these languages were only referred to in the context of very specific discussions such as serial verb constructions. But as the reader of this book will notice, syntactic topics discussed in the context of Kwa range from bare nouns, relative clauses, negation, discourse markers and the interaction with the cla...

GO FOR GOLD With Your Writing shows you how to write gold-winning sentences, sentences that are error-free, clear, concise, varied, and mature. The book shows you, step-by-step, how to construct basic sentences, which form the backbone of all sentences, and how to expand basic sentences by modification, subordination, and coordination, thereby turning them into the kind of sentences that mature writers use in their writing.

Part of the Otto Jespersen collected English Writings Collection, originally published in 1894, this volume is to a certain extent an English translation of Jespersens’ ‘Studier over Engelske Kasus, nted en Indledning: Freniskridt i Sproget’, which was to the University of Copenhagen in February, 1891 on the development of English Language, but with some notable revisions when translated to English.