This book argues that a basic grasp of philosophy and logic can produce written and spoken material that is both grammatically correct and powerful. The author analyses errors in grammar, word choice, phrasing and sentences that even the finest writers can fail to notice; concentrating on subtle missteps and errors that can make the difference between good and excellent prose. Each chapter addresses how common words and long-established grammatical rules are often misused or ignored altoge...

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.

Words have come a long way since they were invented as a nifty tool to help us communicate. We have played with them, made up rules for them, added bits to them and taken bits off. We've gathered them into languages, adopted and defined them. The words we use say so much about who we are, yet most of them slip from our mouths without a second thought.The Book of Words is a brief pause for reflection in the ever-changing life of words, a snapshot of the English language and how we u...

Personality tests are relatively quick and easy to read, and are thus great for improving your English vocabulary and knowledge of idiomatic expressions.These quizzes were designed primarily to enable you to:learn some useful English vocabulary (of the type that is often not taught in a language course)have fun doing something in English that you might equally well have done in your own languageThis book is NOT intended to be...

Victor Dudman's revolutionary English Grammar brings grammar and logic together by conceiving grammar as 'the necessary preliminary to logic'. The focus, for logicians, is the discussion of 'conditionals'; for grammarians it is the concise and accurate explanation of the infamous English modals.

In this book we hope to acquaint the reader with the fundamentals of truth conditional model-theoretic semantics, and in particular with a version of this developed by Richard Montague in a series of papers published during the 1960's and early 1970's. In many ways the paper 'The Proper Treatment of Quantification in Ordinary English' (commonly abbreviated PTQ) represents the culmination of Montague's efforts to apply the techniques developed within mathematical logic to the semantics of n...

This book contains exercises connected with some of the fun or more unusual aspects of the English languageand with games that typically a native English speaker would do. The games have been adapted into a manageable format, but the actual vocabulary contained has not been changed.The types of games include: lateral thinking games, riddles, logic tests, anagrams, palindromes, proverbs, limericks, word ladders, tongue twisters, plus a whole host of other word-related games....

The highly frequent word items TO and OF are often conceived merely as prepositions, carrying little meaning in themselves. This book disputes that notion by analysing the usage patterns found for OF and TO in different sets of text corpora.

This work presents the structure, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions in languages from diverse language families and typological profiles. The current volume pays special attention to underrepresented languages of different status and endangerment level. Languages covered include American and Russian Sign Languages, and sixteen spoken languages from Africa, Australia, Papua, the Americas, and different parts of Asia. The articles respond to a questionn...

This anthology of papers analyzes a range of specificity markers found in natural languages. It reflects the fact that despite intensive research into these markers, the vast differences between the markers across languages and even within single languages have been less acknowledged. Commonly regarded specific indefinites are by no means a homogenous class, and so this volume fills a gap in our understanding of the semantics and pragmatics of indefinites.The papers explore differe...

Covering a strikingly diverse range of languages from 12 linguistic families, this handbook is based on responses to a questionnaire constructed by the editors. Focusing on the formation, distribution and semantic interpretation of quantificational expressions, the book explores 17 languages including German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, Malagasy, Hebrew, Pima, Basque, and more. The language data sets enable detailed crosslinguistic comparison of numerous features. These include sem...

Jokes are a perfect format for learning vocabulary, idiomatic expressions, and grammar. Jokes are also designed to be retold. If you learn a joke by heart and tell it to other people, then by doing so you will also learn the grammar and vocabulary involved.The book also contains exercises designed to reveal whether you have understood the joke or not:A joke is presented to you but with the paragraphs mixed up. Your task is to put them in the correct order.