A Reference Grammar of French is a lively, wide-ranging and original handbook on the structure of the French language. It includes new information on register, pronunciation, gender, number, foreign words (Latin, Arabic, English, Spanish, Italian), adjectives and past participles used as nouns, texting, word order, frequency of occurrence of words, and usage with all geographical names. Examples come not only from France, but also from Quebec, Belgium and Switzerland. Readers will apprecia...

'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...

Essential French Grammar will help you get more out of your study of French.Essential French Grammar is an up-to-date introduction to French grammar. You don't need to know a lot about grammar before you start. Everything is explained simply and there are lots of examples to illustrate each point. Unlike more traditional grammars, Essential French Grammar is structured so that you can look up language forms according to what you want to say, even if you don't know...

‘Let’s eat Grandma’ OR ‘Let’s eat, Grandma’?This fun yet informative book offers bite-sized tips and advice on everything you need to know about grammar – including common misspellings, how to use punctuation correctly, applying the right tense – and will turn you from a logophobe to a grammarphile in no time!

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.

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...

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...

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...

Misadventures in the English Language looks at some of the controversial aspects of English usage – grammar, vocabulary and punctuation – and tries to assess what matters and what doesn’t.Looking at why it pays to be precise in your punctuation – the hackneyed examples of ‘Let’s eat Grandma’ and ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ show how a comma can make all the difference – why tautologies are simply annoying; how corporate speak can actually mean nothing at all;...

This book focuses on case studies of vocabulary strategy use and presents an in-depth account of the vocabulary learning experiences of Chinese students in the UK. It challenges the view that vocabulary strategies result only from learners’ cognitive choices, and provides insightful analysis of the interplay between learner characteristics, agency and context in the process of strategic learning. The author makes a strong case for using qualitative methodologies to examine the dynamic, com...

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....