Dictionaries And Grammars

Eighteenth-century English grammarians plead eloquently for purity, precision and perspicuity, but their method of teaching largely amounts to citing examples of impurity, imprecision and lack of clarity from contemporary writings. This book is the first of its kind to provide a detailed systematic account of such 'errors'. Apart from source and page references, the Dictionary gives the context of the error (I have not wept this forty years), the correct or 'target' form ('these forty years'), the name of the authors quoted by the grammarians ('Addison', 'Swift'), and the labels which sum up their assessment of the error ('absurd', 'solecism'). It operates with error categories such as ambiguity, ellipsis and government (fourteen in all), which are subdivided into grammatically described main entries, subentries, and so on. The Introduction includes a guide to the use of the Dictionary, the grammatical code, and a discussion of grammatical concepts, error typologies, problems of identifying literary sources, attitudes to correctness, grammatical figures, and other topics. A Bibliography and an Index of lexical items and technical terms round off the volume. The way the Dictionary is organized should make it possible to find in it the answer to a wide variety of questions pertaining to grammar, style and linguistic historiography.

The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar is a straightforward and accessible A-Z guide to the diverse and often complex terminology of English grammar. It contains over 1,600 entries with clear and concise definitions, enhanced by numerous example sentences, as well as relevant quotations from the scholarly literature of the field. This second edition is written and edited by Professor Bas Aarts of University College London, writer of the acclaimed Oxford Modern English Grammar. It has been fully revised and updated, with particular attention paid to refreshing the example sentences included within the text. There are over 150 new entries that cover current terminology which has arisen since the publication of the first edition, and there are also new entries on the most important English grammars published since the start of the 20th century. Hundreds of new cross-references enhance the user-friendly nature of the text, and the list of works cited has been thoroughly updated to reflect the current state of the field. A short appendix of web links has been added. All in all, this Dictionary is an invaluable guide to English grammar for all students and teachers of the subject, as well as all those with an informed interest in the English language.

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2+, University of Rostock (Institut für Sprachwissenschaft), course: Hauptseminar: Corpus dictionaries and lexical structure, language: English, abstract: The first dictionary was published in 1984. At that time the focus lay on lexicography especially on English as an international language. Nowadays nearly every three month new dictionaries appear. They are mainly published from publishing houses in Great Britain. This is due to the dominance which British lexicography won in the 1960s. When the first Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English appeared in 1978 British lexicography had finally won dominance to American lexicography. In 1987 the second edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Collins COBUILD Dictionary of the English language appeared. These works were completely different to the ones before. According to Sidney I. Landau these works were “in many respects a daring departure from the customary practices of lexicography, and particularly of ESL lexicography” . They offered a new look at what the user needed. The aim of this paper is to take a closer look on these dictionaries to check whether they are working with authentic language material to explain words and how easy or difficult it is for a user to understand the explained issues. In grammars the different features of a language are considered systematically. Spoken and written language material is described. Nowadays the grammarians are working together with Universities or at least base their entries on large databases that include millions of texts taken out of various forms of writing and communication situations. This system is meant to help to provide the use of authentic language material that is familiar to the grammar user. In the analysed grammars invented examples are avoided with the aim to offer the user a better access to the explained issue. The aim of this paper is to analyse the used example solutions by keeping an eye on whether they are really authentic and easy to understand or not better than the invented ones that were often used in former times.

This book is a dictionary and grammar sketch of Ik, one of the three Kuliak (Rub) languages spoken in the beautiful Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda. It is the lexicographic sequel to \textit{A grammar of Ik (Icé-tód): Northeast Uganda’s last thriving Kuliak language} (Schrock 2014). The present volume includes an Ik-English dictionary with roughly 8,700 entries, followed by a reversed English-Ik index. These two main sections are then supplemented with an outline of Ik grammar that is comprehensive in its coverage of topics and written in a simple style, using standard linguistic terminology in a way that is accessible to interested non-linguists as well. This book may prove useful for language preservation and development among the Ik people, as a reference tool for non-Ik learners of the language, and as a source of data, not only for the comparative study of Kuliak but also the wider Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan language families.

This dictionary aims to help users to find the most appropriate word to use on a wide range of occasions. It is designed in particular for students, those writing reports, letters and speeches, and crossword solvers, but is also useful as a general word reference. Special features include: an alphabetical A-Z listing; numbered senses for words with more than one meaning; British and American variants; and specially marked colloquial uses.

English grammar has changed a great deal since the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and it is a subject that can provide a complex minefield of uncertainties within the language. This accessible and comprehensive dictionary comes to the aid of both the general reader and the student or teacher, offering straightforward and immediate A-Z access to 1,000 grammatical terms and their meanings. All the currently accepted terms of grammar are included, as well as older, traditional names, controversial new coinages, and items from the study of other languages. Concise definitions of the wider subject of linguistics, including phonetics and transformational grammar, are accompanied by examples of language in use, and frequent quotations from existing works on grammar.

This book is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Chakali, a Southwestern Grusi language spoken by less than 3500 people in northwest Ghana. The dictionary offers a consistent description of word meaning and provides the basis for future research in the linguistic area. It is also designed to provide an inventory of correspondence with English usage in a reversal index. The concepts used in the dictionary are explained in a grammar outline, which is of interest to specialists in Gur and Grusi linguistics, as well as any language researchers working in this part of the world.