The Truth About English Grammar

The Truth About English Grammar PDF

Author: Geoffrey K. Pullum

Publisher: Polity

Published: 2024-09-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781509560547

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Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents. Geoff Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With the foundation he provides, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation. Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.

The Truth About English Grammar

The Truth About English Grammar PDF

Author: Geoffrey K. Pullum

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2024-06-13

Total Pages: 124

ISBN-13: 1509560556

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Do you worry that your understanding of English grammar isn’t what it should be? It may not be your fault. For hundreds of years, vague and confused ideas about how to state the rules have been passed down from one generation to the next. The available books for the general reader – thousands of them, shamelessly plagiarizing each other – repeat the same misguided definitions and generalizations that appeared in the schoolbooks used by your great-great-grandparents. Geoffrey K. Pullum thinks you deserve better. In this book he breaks away from the tradition. Presupposing no prior knowledge or technical terms, he provides an informal introduction to the essential concepts underlying grammar and usage. With his foundation, you will be equipped to understand the classification of words, the structure of phrases and clauses, and why some supposed grammar rules are really just myths. Also covered are some of the key points about spelling, apostrophes, hyphens, capitalization, and punctuation. Illuminating, witty, and incisive, The Truth About English Grammar is a vital book for all who love writing, reading, and thinking about English.

Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought

Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought PDF

Author: Anastasia Giannakidou

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2021-08-02

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 022676334X

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"Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions (words like must, may, can, and possible) and propositional attitude verbs (such as know, believe, remember, dream, and persuade). Combining several strands of analysis-formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language- Giannakidou and Mari's theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages including Italian and French, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English, and explaining interactions between modality, time, and evidentiality"--]cProvided by publisher.

English Grammar

English Grammar PDF

Author: Jeffrey P. Kaplan

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13:

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This text gives broad, up-to-date coverage of English grammatical facts and related concepts of introductory linguistics, emphasizing argumentation and motivation for empirically-based grammatical analyses without theoretical debates. It treats the prescriptive/descriptive distinction, phonology, morphology, word classes, phrase structure analysis of both simple sentences and a variety of complex sentences, grammatical relations, and anaphora (pronouns and pronoun-like elements).

Don't Believe a Word

Don't Believe a Word PDF

Author: David Shariatmadari

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1324004258

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A linguist’s entertaining and highly informed guide to what languages are and how they function. Think you know language? Think again. There are languages that change when your mother-in-law is present. The language you speak could make you more prone to accidents. Swear words are produced in a special part of your brain. Over the past few decades, we have reached new frontiers of linguistic knowledge. Linguists can now explain how and why language changes, describe its structures, and map its activity in the brain. But despite these advances, much of what people believe about language is based on folklore, instinct, or hearsay. We imagine a word’s origin is it’s “true” meaning, that foreign languages are full of “untranslatable” words, or that grammatical mistakes undermine English. In Don’t Believe A Word, linguist David Shariatmadari takes us on a mind-boggling journey through the science of language, urging us to abandon our prejudices in a bid to uncover the (far more interesting) truth about what we do with words. Exploding nine widely held myths about language while introducing us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics, Shariatmadari is an energetic guide to the beauty and quirkiness of humanity’s greatest achievement.