The Penguin Dictionary Of English Grammar

This is a succinct guide to the grammatical laws and idiosyncrasmies that govern the English language. It focuses on current usage.

Features more than one thousand primary entries, along with more than two thousand examples of questionable style and the misuse of language, providing valuable lessons for students, writers, and speakers.

This dictionary of grammatical terms covers both current and traditional terminology in syntax and morphology. It includes descriptive terms, the major theoretical concepts of the most influential grammatical frameworks, and the chief terms from mathematical and computational linguistics. It contains over 1500 entries, providing definitions and examples, pronunciations, the earliest sources of terms and suggestions for further reading, and recommendations about competing and conflicting usages. The book focuses on non-theory-boumd descriptive terms, which are likely to remain current for some years. Aimed at students and teachers of linguistics, it allows a reader puzzled by a grammatical term to look it up and locate further reading with ease.

Can anything be described as 'very real'? There are so many obstacles on the way to writing clear, precise ('accurate'?) English ('english'?) that it is a wonder ('wander'?) anyone ('any one' or 'anyone'?) can be understood. Fortunately, all those who have ever feared being shown up by using one of the twenty worst words and phrases to be avoided at all costs, or confusing the complex with the complicated, can now relax and even enjoy a trouble-shooting guide to good writing. Trask's wonderfully readable and authoritative book adjudicates on hundreds of contentious issues from politically correct language to whether to write 'napkin' or 'serviette'.

The Penguin Writers' Guides series provides authoritative, succinct and easy-to-follow guidance on specific aspects of written English. Whether you need to brush up your skills or get to grips with something for the first time, these invaluable Guides will help you find the best way to get your message across clearly and effectively. This essential guide covers the key rules - and pitfalls - of written and spoken grammar. It covers such areas as: the building blocks of language, common errors and misconceptions, choosing the right level of expression, differences between British and American English, and political correctness. It also discusses various uses of language, from creative writing, CVs and reports to verbal presentations, and business and personal letters, with many useful suggestions for accurate and fluent English.

Features more than one thousand primary entries, along with more than two thousand examples of questionable style and the misuse of language, providing valuable lessons for students, writers, and speakers.

The Contributors to this volume offer a broad range of novel insights about data-based or data-driven approaches to the study of both structure and function of language, reflecting the increasing shift towards corpus-based methods of analysis in a wide range of areas in linguistics. Corpora can be used as models of human linguistic experience, and the contributors demonstrate that there is ample scope for integrating such models into the descriptions of discourse, grammar and meaning. Continually improving technological development facilitates the design of larger and more comprehensive corpora documenting language use in a multitude of genres, styles and modes, even starting to include visual aspects. Software to investigate these data also becomes increasingly powerful and more refined. The sixteen original articles in this volume cover substantial ground on both the theoretical as well as applied levels. Having such data and software resources at their disposal, the contributing researchers rethink the long discussed interplay between language system and use from various angles, considering socio-cultural and cognitive involvement and representation, with synchronic as well as diachronic perspectives in view. These theories and quantitative / qualitative methods are applied to a range of topics from language acquisition and teaching to literature and politics. All of the authors in this volume reveal the profound and leading impact that Mike Stubb's work has continued to contribute to the field of corpus-based description of language structure, use and function.

The Penguin Guide to Punctuation is indispensable for anyone who needs to get to grips with using punctuation in their written work. Whether you are puzzled by colons and semicolons, unsure of where commas should go or baffled by apostrophes, this jargon-free, succinct guide is for you.