Travel with fearsome Captain Blackbeard and his crew of pirates across the open seas as they search for treasure and capture ships. But just when Blackbeard thinks he has everything he ever wanted, he realises that it’s being a true pirate that he loves best.Emerald/Band 15 books provide a widening range of genres including science fiction and biography, prompting more ways to respond to texts.Text type: A traditional taleCurriculum links: English: fairy stories, my...

This book provides an introduction to the aims, theories and practices of critical discourse analysis (CDA).It is mainly concerned with the linguistic aspects of CDA. It provides an introduction to the different types of language analysis that are employed in CDA (frequency analysis, coversation, transitivity and reference, and figurative language, for example) and seeks to provide readers with the skills to apply them in different contexts to various types of texts: political speec...

The Functional Analysis of English is an introduction to the analysis and description of English, based on the principles of systemic functional linguistics. It sets out the tools and analytic techniques of Hallidayan grammar with clear explanations of terminology and illustrates these with examples from a variety of texts, including science, travel, history and literary sources. This revised third edition incorporates references to recent research, better explanations of complex ...

The second edition of this hugely successful textbook provides comprehensive coverage of a wide range of topics in theoretical and applied linguistics. Written by leading academics in the field, this text offers a firm grounding in linguistics and includes engaging insights into current research.It covers all the key areas of linguistic analysis, including phonetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics, and core domains of study, comprising the history of the English language, reg...

Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher, developed his critical technique known as 'deconstruction'. His work is associated with ideas surrounding both post-structuralism and post-modern philosophy, and he was known to have challenged some of the unquestioned assumptions of our philosophical tradition. In this Very Short Introduction, Simon Glendinning explores both the difficulty and significance of the work of Derrida. He presents Derrida's challenging ideas as making a significant contr...

Oxford Modern English Grammar is Oxford's brand new and definitive guide to English grammar. This book has been written by a leading expert in the field, covers both British and American English, and makes use of authentic spoken and written examples. Arranged in four clear parts for ease of use, its comprehensive coverage ranges from the very basic to the most complex aspects of grammar, all of which are explained clearly yet authoritatively. This descriptive source of reference is invalu...

Modern academia is increasingly competitive yet the writing style of social scientists is routinely poor and continues to deteriorate. Are social science postgraduates being taught to write poorly? What conditions adversely affect the way they write? And which linguistic features contribute towards this bad writing? Michael Billig's witty and entertaining book analyses these questions in a quest to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong with the way social scientists write. Using examples fr...

'My first English lesson was grammar with the terrifying Mrs Petrie. She spent the entire time marching up and down the classroom, thwacking various items of school furniture with a ruler while she banged on about the ING part of the verb. I sat there, vibrating with fear, desperately trying to figure out what on earth she could mean. Irregular Negative Gerund? Intransitive Nominative Genitive? It was only years later, when I was teaching English to foreign students, that I realised that E...

Popular Great Philosopher's Series.An accessible overview of the work of one of our most influential living philosophers, as part of the popular Great Philosophers series. Richard Rorty is often cited as the most prominent philosophical defender of postmodernism. Best known for his unusually readable books and articles on philosophy - most notably Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989) - Rorty has for some years now...

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...

A spirited defense of the relevance of reason for an era of popular skepticism over such matters as climate change, vaccines, and evolution.Why does reason matter, if (as many people seem to think) in the end everything comes down to blind faith or gut instinct? Why not just go with what you believe even if it contradicts the evidence? Why bother with rational explanation when name-calling, manipulation, and force are so much more effective in our current cultural ...

In clear, congenial style Barry Blake explains how language works. He describes the make-up of words and how they're built from sounds and signs and put together in phrases and sentences. He examines the dynamics of conversation and the relations between the sound and meaning. He shows how languages help their users connect to each other and to the world, how they vary around the world, why they never stop changing, and that no two people speak a language in the same way. He looks at how l...