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A Semantic Approach to English Grammar
Second Edition
R. M. W. Dixon
562 pages
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numerous tables
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246x171mm
978-0-19-924740-0
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Paperback
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30 June 2005
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- New edition of the most lucid, and the wittiest, introduction to English grammar
- New chapters on tense and aspect, nominalizations and possession, and adverbs and negation
- Wide appeal to linguistics and ESl students
- Explains recent changes such as the decline and fall of the tabooed he
New to this edition - New chapters on tense and aspect, nominalizations and possession, and adverbs and negation
- New discussion of comparative forms of adjectives
- Explains recent changes in English grammar, including how they has replaced the tabooed he as a pronoun referring to either gender, as in When a student reads this book, they will learn a lot about English grammar in a most enjoyable manner.
This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would go, and I want to go but not I want that he would go.
The first part of the book reviews the main points of English syntax and discusses
English verbs in terms of their semantic types including those of Motion, Giving, Speaking, Liking, and Trying. In the second part Professor Dixon looks at eight grammatical topics, including complement clauses, transitivity and causatives, passives, and the promotion of a non-subject to subject, as in Dictionaries sell well.
This is the updated and revised edition of A New Approach to English Grammar on Semantic Principles. It includes new chapters on tense and aspect, nominalizations and possession, and adverbs and negation, and contains a new discussion of comparative forms of adjectives. It also explains recent changes in English grammar, including how they has replaced the tabooed he as a pronoun referring to either gender, as in When a student reads this book,
they will learn a lot about English grammar in a most enjoyable manner.Readership: Undergraduate and graduate courses on English linguistics and grammar. Also suitable for advanced English as a second language courses and for use in courses for trainee teachers in ESL
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R. M. W. Dixon, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University
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"This is, in many ways, a near-perfect model of how a descriptive grammar of ANY language should be presented. Although the grammatical treatment and exposition are excellent, for me, one of the best parts of the book are the examples and how they are presented." - Review by Michael W Morgan, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
Review(s) from previous edition
"`Dixon makes insightful and extensive comments on each semantic subtype and its syntactic distribution. The motivated reader ... will find many valid observations and interesting details in Dixon's painstaking descriptions ... a valuable resource book for the nonspecialist who is curious about language.' Language
"an ambitious and extensive account of English grammar ... Books which take a semantic approach to grammar or syntactic approach to semantics are increasingly common ... but I have no hesitation in saying that I find Dixon's book by far the most informative, the one most likely to startle readers repeatedly by telling them what they knew all along but hadn"t realized they knew." - Georgetown Journal of Languages and Linguistics
"will certainly repay repeated reading ... deserves the attention of any serious grammarian of English" - Times Literary Supplement
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Part I Introduction
1: Orientation
2: Grammatical Sketch
Part II The Semantic Types
3: Noun, Adjective, and Verb Types
4: Primary-A Verb Types
5: Primary-B Verb Types
6: Secondary Verb Types
Part III Some Grammatical Topics
7: Tense and Aspect
8: Complement Clauses
9: Transitivity and Causatives
10: Nominalisations and Possession
11: Passives
12: Adverbs and Negation
13: Promotion to Subject
14: GIVE A VERB, HAVE A VERB, and TAKE A VERB Constructions
Appendix
References
Books by R.M.W. Dixon
Index
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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