English for Journalists has established itself in newsrooms the world over as an invaluable guide to the basics of English and to those aspects of writing, such as reporting speech, house style and jargon, which are specific to the language of journalism. Written in a highly accessible and engaging style, English for Journalists covers the fundamentals of grammar, spelling, punctuation and journalistic writing, with all points illustrated through a series of concise and illuminating examples. The book features practical, easy-to-follow advice with examples of common mistakes and problem words.

This thirtieth anniversary edition features a revised first chapter on the state of English today by author Wynford Hicks, and a chapter on writing for social media by Gavin Allen, along with an updated glossary and references.

This is an essential guide to written English for practising journalists and students of journalism today.

Table of Contents

Introduction: how this book began

1 English today

2 Grammar: the rules

3 Grammar: 10 common mistakes

4 Grammar: problems and confusions

5 Spelling

6 Punctuation

7 Reporting speech

8 Style

9 Social media

10 Words

11 Foreign words

12 Figures

Appendix 1 Style guide

Appendix 2 The ‘fronted adverbial’ muddle

Appendix 3 Glossary of terms

Further reading

Index

Tense, Attitudes, and Scope is a model-theoretic inquiry into the semantics of tense in natural language. The book presents the view that the semantic contribution of tense is made in relation to structurally higher expressions (the `relative tense theory') and argues against the view that tenses are all indexicals. This idea is formally encoded as a de se analysis of attitudes, originally proposed by Lewis, coupled with a sequence-of-tense rule posited for English. An auxiliary proposal is made to account for some exceptional cases (e.g. so-called double-access sentences), which invokes de re attitudes about temporal entities (states or intervals). Since the proposed account assumes that the interpretation of tense is structure-dependent, it also correctly predicts scope interactions between tenses and NPs. Tense, Attitudes, and Scope is intended for scholars and graduate students in formal semantics, syntax-semantics interface, philosophy of language and Japanese linguistics.

This volume collects some of Juan Uriagereka's previously published pieces and presentations on biolinguistics in recent years in one comprehensive volume. The book's introduction lays the foundation for the field of biolinguistics, which looks to integrate concepts from the natural sciences in the analysis of natural language, situating the discussion within the minimalist framework. The volume then highlights eight of the author's key papers from the literature, some co-authored, representative of both the architectural and evolutionary considerations to be taken into account within biolinguistic research. The book culminates in a final chapter showcasing the body of work being done on biolinguistics within the research program at the University of Maryland and their implications for interdisciplinary research and future directions for the field. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in the interface between language and the natural sciences, including linguistics, syntax, biology, archaeology, and anthropology.

This book brings together for the first time a series of previously published papers featuring Ian Roberts' pioneering work on diachronic and comparative syntax over the last thirty years in one comprehensive volume. Divided into two parts, the volume engages in recent key topics in empirical studies of syntactic theory, with the eight papers on diachronic syntax addressing major changes in the history of English as well as broader aspects of syntactic change, including the introduction to the formal approach to grammaticalisation, and the eight papers on comparative syntax exploring head-movement, the nature and distribution of clitics, and the nature of parametric variation and change. This comprehensive collection of the author's body of research on diachronic and comparative syntax is an essential resource for scholars and researchers in theoretical, comparative, and historical linguistics.

1) Covering all the layers of the sentence right periphery in Chinese, eight sentence-final particles and the interaction among them are comprehensively studied. 2) Through the lens of feature theory, the theoretical views from a variety of dimensions are discussed. 3) It allows us to see how L2 learners whose first language has no similar equivalents acquire these peripheral particles. 4) With its commonly used nature in spoken Chinese, both the linguistic analysis and the findings from the empirical studies of the particles in this book are significant for learning and teaching of Chinese.

Saramaccan has been central to various debates regarding the origin and nature of creole languages. Being the most removed of all English-based creoles from European language structure in terms of phonology, morphology and syntax, it has been seen as one of the most extreme instantiations of the creolization process. This is the first full-length description of Saramaccan. The grammar documents, in particular, a valence-sensitive system of indicating movement and direction via serial verb constructions, hitherto overlooked amidst the generalized phenomenon of serialization itself.

As a contribution to the ongoing discussion of the genesis of the Germanic language, this book investigates the strong verbs of Proto-Germanic using a new approach that combines historical and typological morphology with quantitative etymology. It reveals that the morphological peculiarities and the etymological problems of the strong verbs have been considerably underestimated. The first part of the book explains how drastically the inherited verb system was transformed when it was uniformized and simplified around a functionalized verbal ablaut. In particular, it is shown that the systemic position of ablaut is typologically different from that in the verb morphology of the Indo-European parent language. Moreover, the origin of the lengthened grade preterits and other well-known morphological problems of the strong verbs are discussed. After developing a methodological framework, the second part of the book presents a quantitative analysis of the etymological situation of the strong verbs. It demonstrates that the etymological relations of the strong verbs are significantly less clear than commonly assumed, as almost half of them have no accepted etymology. A comparative quantification of the primary verbs of Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, both of which possess much better etymological connections within the Indo-European language family, underlines the significance of the Germanic data and the validity of the analytical framework. Taken together, the investigations presented in this book put the Germanic strong verbs in a new and markedly different light. Their largely obscure etymological situation in combination with their far-reaching morphological restructuring has telling implications for the prehistory of the Germanic languages and suggests new pathways for future research.

Classification of parts of speech in Chinese is tough due to the lack of morphological differences, and thus is short of in-depth investigation and exploration. Based on the analysis and research of nearly 40,000 Chinese characters, this book elaborates on the system of Chinese parts of speech and proposes a set of criteria on their classification, contributing to relevant theoretical and methodological studies. To begin with, it examines the common characteristics and internal hierarchies of parts of speech, as well as the relationship between grammatical functions and parts of speech in modern Chinese. Then it puts forward the criteria on the classification of Chinese parts of speech, with a descriptive explanation of around 20 parts of speech. Besides, it illustrates the statistical studies on Chinese parts of speech, offering data support and corpus verification to the criteria. Also, it analyses the system of Chinese parts of speech from the perspective of typology. Specifically, it elucidates the correspondence between syntactic positions and parts of speech, functional differentiation of Chinese word items, etc. This book will be a valuable reference to researchers and students in Chinese linguistics. Learners of Chinese will also be attracted by it.

This title, first published in 1988, is an inquiry into the nature of predication in natural language. The study is based on the hypothesis that infinitives and gerunds are not clausal or propositional constructions and attempts to provide support for such a hypothesis, whilst also drawing from analysis of various anaphoric phenomena. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

Coordination is a syntactic construction which occurs in most languages. In the past, it has been a fruitful area of research, but also a controversial one. Arguments from coordination have been used in support of transformations, and against phrase-structure rules, but also in support of phrase-structure rules and against transformations. This

This book, first published in 1990, is a study of both the specific syntactic changes in the more recent stages of Greek and of the nature of syntactic change in general. Guided by the constraints and principles of Universal Grammar, this hypothesis of this study allows for an understanding of how these changes in Greek syntax occurred and so provides insight into the mechanism of syntactic change. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

The aim of this book is to demonstrate that, in a representation-based model, the phonological organization of speech sounds within a word is reducible to the licensing properties of nuclei with respect to structurally defined complexities which pose varying demands on the licenser. It is assumed that the primitive licensing relation is that between a nucleus and its onset (O N). There are two main types of complexities concerning the onset position. Substantive complexity is an important aspect of phonological organisation at the melodic level, while the syllabic configurations in which the onset may be found are referred to under the heading of formal complexity. At the melodic level, complexity is defined in terms of the number of privative primes called elements. The asymmetries in the subsegmental representations of consonants and vowels are shown to play a pivotal role in understanding a number of phenomena, such as typological patterns, markedness effects, phonological processes, segmental inventories, and, what is most important, the model allows us to see a direct connection between phonological representations and processes. For example, the deletion of [g] in Welsh initial mutations is strictly related to the fact that the prime which crucially defines this object also happens to be the target of Soft Mutation. The complexity at the syllabic level is defined in terms of formal onset configurations called governing relations, of which some are easier to license than others. The formal complexity scale is not rerankable, and corresponds directly to the markedness of syllabic types. Since each formal configuration requires licensing from the following nucleus, syllable typology can be directly derived from the licensing strength of nuclei. The interaction between the higher prosodic organisation, for example, the level of the foot, and the syllabic level is also easily expressible in this model because higher prosody is built on nuclei. Therefore, prosody may tamper with the status of nuclei as licensers by deeming some of them as prosodically weaker than others, thus producing a non-rerankable scale of nuclear licensers (a " P). The inclusion of the empty nucleus as a possible licenser allows us to unify the scale of relatively marked contexts in segmental phenomena, and also to account for such problems as extrasyllabicity, complex clusters, super heavy rhymes, and other exceptional strings. The role of nuclei as licensers in unifying various levels of phonological representation from melody to word structure is unquestionable. There are other areas of phonological theory which can be expressed in this model. These include the role of nuclear strength scales in register switches, dialectal variation, historical development, language acquisition, and the interaction between phonology and morphology.

This volume uses unique properties of Chinese script to focus on morphological analyses during the character and word recognition process, though some of the reported work also pertains to the use of phonological information. In addition, this volume contains work on syntactic and pragmatic processes during sentence reading and three chapters that examine on-line processes. A comprehensive appraisal of cognitive processes during the reading of Chinese script that includes studies conducted by leading researchers from within and outside the mainland, this volume will be of interest to all those studying reading and visual symbol processing.

This study analyzes the use of conceptual metaphors on Polish and American internet forums for mothers. In order to achieve these objectives, the author compiled a corpus consisting of ten thousand posts from Polish internet forums and ten thousand posts from American ones. The topics of threads were various, ranging from giving advice on breastfeeding to sex during pregnancy. The study contributes to a better understanding of online discussions - this issue has not been frequently investigated, especially from a comparative perspective.

The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Birgit Sievert

First published in 1988, this book examines the aspects of pragmatic competence involving the class of preposing constructions in English. By limiting the scope of investigation to particular grammatical categories, the author argues previous studies have failed to capture significant pragmatic generalisations. The author asserts what distinguishes one preposing type from another are the semantic and pragmatic properties of the referent of that constituent. After a review of the past literature on preposing, the book goes on to present a pragmatic theory in which two discourse functions of preposing are proposed. It then provides a functional taxonomy of the various preposing types which the theory is designed to account for. One type of preposing, Topicalization, and two of its subtypes, Proposition Affirmation and Ironic Preposing, are discussed in detail in the subsequent chapters before the book concludes with a summary along with directions for future research.

First published in 1983, this book examines anaphora - a central issue in linguistic theory as it lies at the crossroads of several major problems. On the one hand it is believed that the same conditions that govern the interpretation of anaphora also govern syntactic movement rules but on the other, while anaphora is known to interact with various discourse and semantic considerations, it also provides a clear instance of the dependency of the semantic interpretation of sentences upon semantic properties of natural language. This book has two major goals: the first is a comprehensive analysis of sentence-level anaphora that addresses the questions posed above, and the second is an examination of the broader issues of the relations between the structural properties of sentences and their semantic interpretation within the hypotheses of the autonomy of syntax and of interpretative semantics shown by Chomsky.

First published in 1994, this book is concerned with certain kinds of wh-clauses, whose interpretations are easily and, the author argues, plausibly rendered by a logicosemantic analysis on which wh-phrases translate as open sentences, that is, as expressions of the semantically interpreted representation which contain free variables. After a review of influential contemporary analyses of the semantics of questions, concentrating on issues related to the truthconditional interpretation of these constructions, the author goes on to analyse logicosemantic similarities between wh-phrases and indefinite NPs. This analysis is extended in chapter V to account for asymmetries between wh-phrases and indefinites, but is preceded by the engagement and refutation of some of the challenges to it. The appendices discuss some peripheral points relating to the central points made by the author which are in need of further study.

First published in 1987, this book is an attempt to re-establish semiotic on the basis of principles consistent with its past history, rather than the 'cultural semiotics' of the European tradition, and especially with the guiding ideas of Peirce and Morris. The book is divided into two parts, with the first two chapters providing the background for the more systematic discussions of signs at different levels taken up in the last three. In the final chapter issues that have become the focus of recent philosophy of language regarding the reference, meaning, and truth of sentences are discussed in light of the analogies to more primitive signs developed in the preceding two chapters.

First published in 2000, this book is about sentences containing the word or, dealing primarily with sentences in which or conjoins clauses, but also some cases in which it conjoins expressions of other categories. The author aims to give an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction, and to use this account in explaining the behaviour of presupposition projection and of anaphora in disjunctive sentences. The author begins by giving an account of the discourse properties and felicity conditions of disjunction before turning to the presupposition projection problem. The final two chapters discuss anaphora and its interactions with disjunction.

The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.

• The first introductory book of its kind to focus on morphology whilst assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics and linguistic concepts; • Written in a lively and conversational manner and uses a variety of languages as examples in order to appeal to not only an introductory undergraduate market studying linguistics but also a more general readership; • Includes pedagogical features throughout including data analysis, exercises and questions to engage with the reader.

This book offers original theoretical accounts and a wealth of descriptive information concerning modality in present-day English. At the same time, it provides fresh impetus to more general linguistic issues such as grammaticalization, colloquialization, or the interplay between sociolinguistic and syntactic constraints. The articles fall into four sections: (a) the semantics and pragmatics of core modal verbs; (b) the status of emerging modal items; (c) stylistic variation and change; (d) sociolinguistic variation and syntactic models. The book is of considerable value to students and teachers of English and Linguistics at undergraduate and graduate level worldwide.

This volume presents a series of papers written by Epstein, Kitahara and Seely, each of which explores fundamental linguistic questions and analytical mechanisms proposed in recent minimalist work, specifically concerning recent analyses by Noam Chomsky. The collection includes eight papers by the collaborators (one with Miki Obata), plus three additional papers, each individually authored by Epstein, Kitahara and Seely, that cover a range of related topics including: the minimalist commitment to explanation via simplification; the Strong Minimalist Thesis; strict adherence to simplest Merge, Merge (X, Y) = {X, Y}, subject to 3rd factor constraints; and state-of-the-art concepts and consequences of Chomsky's most recent proposals. For instance, the volume clarifies and explores: the properties of Merge, feature inheritance and Agree; the nature of phases, cyclicity and countercyclicity; the properties of Transfer; the interpretation of features and their values and the role formal features play in the form and function of syntactic operations; and the specific properties of derivations, partially ordered rule application, and the nature of interface representations. At the cutting edge of scholarship in generative syntax, this volume will be an essential resource for syntax researchers seeking to better understand the minimalist program.