What do English-speaking Canadians sound like and why? Can you tell the difference between a Canadian and an American? A Canadian and an Englishman? If so, how? Linguistically speaking is Canada a colony of Britain or a satellite of the United States? Is there a Canadian language? Speaking Canadian English, first published in 1971, in a non-technical way, describes English as it is spoken in Canada – its vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, grammar, spelling, slang. This title comments on the history of Canadian English – how it came to sound the way it does – and attempts to predict what will happen to it in the future. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics.
Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Dictionary (AD) is the most ambitious attempt to date to provide a comprehensive lexicon as well as a coherent theoretical framework for the study of semiotics. Generally speaking, it embraces historical and interdisciplinary aspects of semiotics along with American, Continental, and Russian traditions. However, on the latter point it should be stated from the outset that the French tradition, with its special emphasis on Saussurean and Hjelmslevian linguistics, prevails.
Tackling the role of syntactic constructions in text, this textbook brings out the connections between syntactic structures and semantics/pragmatics and the function of different clausal structures in written and spoken texts. It also draws attention to variation in standard written English, to the grammatical structures and discourse devices in spoken English, and to ongoing changes in English grammar. It focuses on the concepts of descriptive grammar as extended and refined over the last fifty years. This is a practical yet flexible reference that you can return to again and again, whether it be for learning, research or teaching.
This book, first published in 1950, is a collection of what the author felt to be the minimum of English grammar relevant to efficient communication in language. The scope of this title was determined by collecting from children’s writings examples of common faults and weaknesses, and it is through these texts that certain concepts emerged as fundamental, including predication, word-order, proximity, equivalents, variety and repetition. Pattern in English will be of interest to students of English language.
The present study is situated at the interface of morphology and lexical semantics. It investigates the semantics of two derivational English suffixes: -age and -ery. Although some recent investigations have started to study the semantics of affixation systematically (e.g. Lieber 2004), there are, on the whole, very few thorough accounts of the semantics of derivational morphology. This leads Lieber (2012: 2108) to claim that “the most neglected area of morphological theory in the last three decades has been derivational semantics”.
