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...

Essential English Grammar is packed with easy-to-follow explanations and summaries, practical tips on how to avoid common grammar mistakes, interesting facts about the historical and regional use of English and a special section on punctuation. This clear, straightforward guide to modern English grammar will help you to improve your knowledge of the language and perfect your grammar.NOT GOT MUCH TIME?One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you starte...

This piece of work began life as a doctoral thesis written at the University of Texas between 1976 and 1978. Now after a year in Dublin it is to become a book. Of the many people in the Department of Linguistics at Texas who shaped my interests and who helped me through the writing of the thesis, I must single out Lee Baker, Lauri Karttunen, Bill Ladusaw, Sue Schmerling and Stanley Peters for special gratitude. All of them have provided specific suggestions which have improved this work, b...

This book is based in large part on fieldwork that I conducted in Brittany and Wales in 1983 and 1985. I am thankful for a Fulbright Award for Research in Western Europe and a Faculty Development Award from the University of North Carolina that funded that fieldwork. lowe a less tangible, but no less real, debt to Steve Anderson, G. M. Awbery, Steve Harlow and Jim McCloskey whose work initially sparked my interest, and led me to undertake this project. I want to thank Joe Emonds and Alec M...

Noun Phrases and Nominalizations: The Syntax of DPs is a theoretical study of nominal expressions which covers central aspects of their syntax that have not been approached with concurrent tools in recent years. The study examines the functional structure, offers a structural definition of syntactic nominalization, and carefully draws the border line between the lexical nominalizing mechanism and its syntactic counterpart. The empirical base of the study is broad and varied: it ex...

Examining its subject from a generative perspective, this highly detailed text deals with the syntax of nominal expressions. It focuses on empirical data taken from the Spanish language, though the author goes further to draw conclusions of wider theoretical interest from material culled from other languages too.The book considers crucial phenomena in the nominal domain, such as extraction out of nominal phrases and ellipsis in these phrases, as well as their modification. In doing...

This book presents the latest work in the field of complementation studies. Leading scholars and upcoming researchers in the area approach complementation from various perspectives and different frameworks, such as Cognitive Grammar and construction grammars, to offer a broad survey of the field and provide thought-provoking reading.

This comprehensive treatment of several phenomena in Distributed Morphology explores a number of topics of high relevance to current linguistic theory. It examines the structure of the syntactic and postsyntactic components of word formation, and the role of hierarchical, featural, and linear restrictions within the auxiliary systems of several varieties of Basque.The postsyntactic component is modeled as a highly articulated system that accounts for what is shared and what exhibit...

This book defines Chinese middle constructions as generic constructions, with their highest syntactically saturated argument always understood as an arbitrary one. This working definition sets “middle construction” apart from “middle voice” in that it can be instantiated by various constructions in Chinese. By scrutinizing these constructions in the framework of Generative Syntax, the book concludes that their formation takes place at the lexical level, without resorting to any syntactic m...

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 monograph investigates the modular architecture of language through the nature of "uninterpretable" phi-features: person, number, gender, and Case. It provides new tools and evidence for the modular architecture of the human language faculty, a foundational topic of linguistic research. At the same time it develops a new theory for one of the core issues posed by the Minimalist Program: the relationship of syntax to its interfaces and the nature of uninterpretable features. The work s...