This book represents the culmination of an extended period of field work on the Palauan language, carried out while I was a graduate student at the University of California at San Diego. The book was born as a short term paper written in 1982; from a forgettable infancy, that paper grew and grew, reaching the age of majority in my dissertation at the end of 1985. Some of its offspring have gone off on their own, as indepen dent papers, as course materials, or as thoughts that have not yet ...

'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...

Everything you need to know about the 25 essential rules of English grammar.English grammar is often said to be over-complicated and difficult to get to grips with but the truth is that, while there are certain rules that should be obeyed, the language evolves and develops over time – and quite rightly so.In this useful book, Joseph Piercy outlines the 25 rules that should be adhered to in written and spoken English, defining the rules themselves and then d...

This book is based on a study of referees' reports and letters from journal editors on reasons why papers written by non-native researchers are rejected due to problems with English grammar. It draws on English-related errors from around 5000 papers written by non-native authors, several hundred emails, 500 abstracts by PhD students, and over 1000 hours of teaching researchers how to write and present research papers.The exercises include the following areas:active vs...

The main goal of this study, first published in 1994, is to present a substantial part of the grammar of French. This goal is achieved by bringing together two aspects of syntactic investigation. First, the study focuses on a vast range of French clausal phenomena, including Object Raising constructions, Causative constructions of various types, Impersonal constructions, amongst many others. Second, the investigation is conducted within the framework of Relational Grammar. This title will ...

Generative Grammar presents a substantial contribution to the field of linguistics in drawing together for the first time the author's most significant work on the theory of generative grammar.The essays collected here display Freidin's role in moving the theory forward in terms of new proposals, and analyse the efforts to understand the evolution and history of the theory by careful investigation of how and why it has changed over the years.

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...

Finishing this book was one of the most difficult things I have ever done. It took far too long from original idea to page proofs and suffered from being relegated to small corners of my life. It was very rarely on the front burner. Since I started working on this topic in 1991, there has been a lot of interesting work done on the areas of the articulation of VP, phrase structure mirroring event structure, the use of functional categories to represent Aktionsart, and many other areas that ...

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of the syntax of Palauan that will appeal to anyone interested in Austronesian languages or formal syntactic and morphological theory. This volume proposes that words in Palauan are not drawn directly from a mental lexicon, but are instead composed at least partially in the syntax. Using original data from syntactic constructions not previously explored in the language, the author entertains several competing theories of word formation and high...

The latest in Springer's "Medical English" series, aimed at health care professionals who need English for their work but do not speak English on a day-to-day basis. Although much of the information provided will be useful for scientists of all backgrounds and nationalities, the book is aimed especially at non-native English-speaking physicians and biomedical scientists. It offers clear advice on a variety of topics relevant to the successful preparation and delivery of scientific presenta...

This volume presents articles that focus on the application of formal models in the study of language in a variety of innovative ways, and is dedicated to Jacques Moeschler, professor at University of Geneva, to mark the occasion of his 60th birthday. The contributions, by seasoned and budding linguists of all different linguistic backgrounds, reflect Jacques Moeschler’s diverse and visionary research over the years. The book contains three parts. The first part shows how different formal ...

The book addresses one of the key controversies in teaching foreign language grammar, which is the utility of production-oriented instruction, as exemplified in the PPP sequence, and comprehension-based teaching, as implemented in interpretation tasks and processing instruction. It provides a thorough overview of issues related to learning and teaching grammar, with a particular focus on input-oriented approaches, and reports the findings of four studies which sought to compare their effec...