First published in 1986, this book examines the changing patterns in English usage and style. It encourages a constructive attitude to language, demonstrating the creative resources of grammar, discussing in detail the options of written style, and challenging the authoritarian spirit that inhibits usage. The central chapters are concerned with written usage, and pay close attention to questions of syntax and punctuation. The sense of writing, however, is always related to speech, and the value of usage as a social act is emphasised in the exploration of style as an individual function. Technical terms are explained and the text is illustrated with examples from literature and journalism.

This series is designed to meet the needs of students and lecturers of the National Certificate Vocational. Features for the student include: Easy-to-understand language; Real-life examples; A key word feature for important subject terms; A dictionary feature for difficult words; A reflect-on-how-you-learn feature to explore personal learning styles; Workplace-oriented activities; and Chapter summaries that are useful for exam revision.

This is the first comprehensive description of Savosavo, a non-Austronesian (Papuan) language spoken by approximately 2,500 speakers on Savo Island, Solomon Islands. Based on primary field data recorded by the author, it provides an overview of all levels of grammar. In addition, a full chapter is dedicated to nominalization of verbs by means of one particular suffix, which occur in a number of constructions ranging from lexical to syntactic nominalization. The appendix provides glossed example texts and a list of lexemes.

A fun and helpful resource for anyone interested in learning some Vietnamese--whether you're 5 or 100! This picture dictionary covers the 1,500 most useful Vietnamese words and phrases. Each word and sentence is given using the Vietnamese alphabet--with a Romanized version to help you pronounce it correctly--along with the English meaning. The words are grouped into 40 different themes or topics, including basics, like meeting someone new and using public transportation, to culture-specific topics, like celebrating Vietnamese holidays and eating Vietnamese food. This colorful picture dictionary includes: Over 750 color photographs 1,500 culture-specific Vietnamese words and phrases 38 different topics--from social media and counting to Vietnamese food and holidays Example sentences showing how the words are used Free online audio recordings by native Vietnamese speakers of all the vocabulary and sentences to download or stream An introduction to Vietnamese pronunciation and grammar A bidirectional index to allow you to quickly look up words Vietnamese Picture Dictionary makes language learning more fun than traditional phrasebooks. This resource is perfect for beginners of all ages--curious kids, visual learners and future travelers to Vietnam.

This study, first published in 1985, analyses aspects of the syntax of K'ekchi, a Mayan language spoken in Guatemala. Working in the framework of Relational Grammar, the author finds evidence for the constructions of Passive, Antipassive and 2-3 Retreat and provides formulations for the principles of Personal Agreement, Number Agreement, Nominal Case, and Aspect Marking. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

This absorbing collection of metaphors includes a variety of expressions with figurative meanings, like similes, proverbs, slang and catchphrases. It is the result of a lifetime of work on dialect and metaphor and gives an overview of the folk wisdom expressed in figurative expressions. The author draws on his extensive contact with the rural cultures of Dorset, Cornwall, Yorkshire and Lancashire, but has also included a range of sayings from North America, Australia, Scotland and other English speaking countries. With revised contents and an improved index to make individual entries easier to find, the Concise can be used to check the meaning and the origin of an expression or to avoid mixed metaphors, anachronisms and incongruities. It is a joy to browse long after your original query has been answered.

Neverver is an Oceanic language spoken by just over 500 people on the high island of Malekula in Vanuatu. Drawing on an extensive corpus of field recordings collected between 2004 and 2008, the analysis reveals a very interesting phonological system with six prenasalized segments, rich systems of possession, tense/aspect/mood marking, valence change, and verb serialization. The grammaris of interest to specialists in Oceanic and Austronesian linguistics, as well as to general linguists, especially those interested in linguistic typology.

First published in 1986, this book examines the changing patterns in English usage and style. It encourages a constructive attitude to language, demonstrating the creative resources of grammar, discussing in detail the options of written style, and challenging the authoritarian spirit that inhibits usage. The central chapters are concerned with written usage, and pay close attention to questions of syntax and punctuation. The sense of writing, however, is always related to speech, and the value of usage as a social act is emphasised in the exploration of style as an individual function. Technical terms are explained and the text is illustrated with examples from literature and journalism.

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.

From one of America's most influential writing teachers, a collection of 50 of the best writing strategies distilled from 50 writing and language books -- from Aristotle to Strunk and White. With so many excellent writing guides lining bookstore shelves, it can be hard to know where to look for the best advice. Should you go with Natalie Goldberg or Anne Lamott? Maybe William Zinsser or Donald Murray would be more appropriate. Then again, what about the classics -- Strunk and White, or even Aristotle himself? Thankfully, your search is over. In Murder Your Darlings, Roy Peter Clark, who for more than 30 years has been a beloved and revered writing teacher to children and Pulitzer prize-winners alike, has compiled a remarkable collection of 50 of the best writing tips from 50 of the best writing books of all time. With a chapter devoted to each piece of advice, Clark expands and contextualizes the original author's suggestions, and offers anecdotes about how each one helped him or other writers sharpen their skills. An invaluable resource for scribblers of all kinds, Murder Your Darlings is an inspiring and edifying ode to the craft of writing.

This innovative volume offers a comprehensive account of the study of language change in verb meaning in the history of the English language. Integrating both the author's previous body of work and new research, the book explores the complex dynamic between linguistic structures, morphosyntactic and semantics, and the conceptual domain of meaning, employing a consistent theoretical treatment for analyzing different classes of predicates. Building on this analysis, each chapter connects the implications of these findings from diachronic change with data from language acquisition, offering a unique perspective on the faculty of language and the cognitive system. In bringing together a unique combination of theoretical approaches to provide an in-depth analysis of the history of diachronic change in verb meaning, this book is a key resource to researchers in historical linguistics, theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, and the history of English.

Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials provides students, career-builders, and professional writers with the basic elements needed for writing in the 21st century. The book fully explains and links the five essentials of good writing: 1.punctuation, 2.grammar, 3.fact-checking, 4.style, and 5.voice Throughout history technology has changed both language and writing. Today in the digital age, language and writing are changing at a phenomenal pace. Students, career-builders, and professional writers need this guide that reviews those changes and connects the essentials for creating good writing in the digital age. Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials gives writers the tools needed today. Among other essentials, the book: .Resolves comma issues by explaining the Open and Close Punctuation systems. Writers select which system to use in their writing. .Clarifies active and passive voice verbs and advocates using strong, specific verbs in writing. .Provides guidelines for choosing credible online websites when searching for resources. .Examines attributes of essentials that contribute to a writing style and urges a critical review of verbs. .Connects elements that combine to create a voice in a written piece. Relevant and succinctly written, Writing Well in the 21st Century: The Five Essentials gives readers the basics they need to know to create well-written documents for school, work and in their professional writing."

The subject of this study, first published in 1979, is the role of the complementizer in English syntax and its implications for syntactic theory. It is argued that the familiar transformational treatment of complementizers is inadequate, and that they must be specified in deep structure by means of a Phrase Structure rule. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

In this study the author not only comments on some of the important processes in the syntax of the Mojave language but also provides the reader with an introduction to a language whose grammar had, previous to the titles publication in 1976, never been described. This title will be of interest to students of language and linguistics.

The goal of foreign language teaching is expanding from communicative competence towards an intercultural action competence. Essential in the new orientation is the shift towards a more balanced emphasis between the external factors in the learning environment and the personal capacity, conceptions, beliefs and assumptions inside the learner's mind. As part of the changes, assessment is seen as an important means of enhancing the elearning processes, emphasising the role of refelctive self-assessment. The text explores and integrates the necessary knowledge base and practices in foreign language education in terms of the basic concepts of experiential learning, intercultural learning, autobiographical knowledge and teacher development, together with the philosophical underpinnings of foreign language education.

First published in 1984, this book was designed to benefit the foreign learner who wishes to grasp the essential basis of English stress so that he or she can go on to predict stress patterns in new words. It is aimed at teachers of English as a foreign language and helps them to communicate English stress effectively to their students. The book bridges the gap between books that are mainly anecdotal or abstract, practical or theoretical, or made up of lists or principles.

This handbook provides easy access to current practice and requirements in the main spoken language technologies.

In the light of Chinese prosody and various mutually illuminating major cases from the original English, Chinese, French, Japanese and German classical literary texts, the book explores the possibility of discovering "a road not taken" within the road well-trodden in literature. In an approach of "what Wittgenstein calls criss-crossing," this monographic study, the first ever of this nature, as Roger T. Ames points out in the Foreword, also emphasizes a pivotal "recognition that these Chinese values [revealed in the book] are immediately relevant to the Western narrative as well"; the book demonstrates, in other words, how such a "criss-crossing" approach would be unequivocally possible as long as our critical attention be adequately turned to or pivoted upon the "trivial" matters, a posteriori, in accordance with the live syntactic-prosodic context, such as pauses, stresses, phonemes, function words, or the at once text-enlivened and text-enlivening ambiguity of "parts of speech," which often vary or alter simultaneously according to and against any definitive definition or set category a priori. This issue pertains to any literary text across cultures because no literary text would ever be possible if it were not, for instance, literally enlivened by the otherwise overlooked "meaningless" function words or phonemes; the texts simultaneously also enliven these "meaningless" elements and often turn them surreptitiously into sometimes serendipitously meaningful and beautiful sea-change-effecting "les mots justes." Through the immeasurable and yet often imperceptible influences of these exactly "right words," our literary texts, such as a poem, could thus not simply "be" but subtly "mean" as if by mere means of its simple, rich, and naturally worded being, truly a special "word picture" of das Ding an sich. Describable metaphorically as "museum effect" and "symphonic tapestry," a special synaesthetic impact could also likely result from such les-mots-justes-facilitated subtle and yet phenomenal sea changes in the texts.

The subject of this study is the language of commerce and diplomacy during the period from 1500 BCE to 1500 CE. Based on texts of chancery provenance, its aim is the identification of a linguistic sub-system that effected and informed the major channel of international relations. The standard procedures of contact and exchange generated a format that facilitated inter-lingual transfer of concepts and terms. Lingua Franca refers to the several natural languages that served as vehicle in the transfer, but also to the format itself.

The Routledge Student Guide to English Usage is an invaluable A-Z guide to the appropriate use of English in academic contexts. The first part of the book covers approximately 4000 carefully selected words, focusing on groups of confusable words that sound alike, look alike or are frequently mixed up. The authors help to solve academic dilemmas, such as correct usage of the apostrophe and the crucial difference between infer and imply. Examples of good usage are drawn from corpora such as the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English. The second part covers the key characteristics of formal English in a substantial reference section, comprising: * stylistic features * punctuation * English grammar * the use of numbers * email writing. This is the essential reference text for all students working on improving their academic writing skills. Visit the companion website for a range of supporting exercises: www.routledge.com/cw/clark.