This book is conceived as a contribution to the general understanding of learner language. It presents an innovative approach to the study of English false friends. False friends are a current issue for those learning and working with languages since these lexical items may spring up in different contexts of our everyday life. The book identifies false friends in real samples of learner English, reflects on the difficulty of these words and illustrates the specific problems which should be addressed in the EFL classroom. The ultimate purpose of this book is to cast new light on both the skillful and awkward use of false friends in learner English.
This book develops a theory of the morpheme in the framework of Distributed Morphology. Particular emphasis is devoted to the way in which functional morphemes receive their phonological form post-syntactically, through the operation of Vocabulary Insertion. In addition to looking closely at syncretism, the primary motivation for Vocabulary Insertion, the book examines allomorphy, blocking, and other key topics in the theory of the morpheme.
24 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture Taught by Willard Spiegelman
The verse of the English Romantic poets is as daunting in its scope and complexity as it is dazzling in its technique and beautiful in its language. Now, Professor Willard Spiegelman illuminates masterpieces of English literature by poets Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron, as well as the women Romantic poets. How to Read and Understand Poetry, his emphasis is on technique, on how a poem accomplishes its objectives, on "how it means." To this end, he meticulously dissects the poems, directing you to points of interest that deserve close observation. What Is Romanticism?
Syntax puts our meaning (“semantics”) into sentences, and phonology puts the sentences into the sounds that we hear and there must, surely, be a structure in the meaning that is expressed in the syntax and phonology. Some writers use the phrase “semantic structure”, but are referring to conceptual structure; since we can express our conceptual thought in many different linguistic ways, we cannot equate conceptual and semantic structures.
This book sheds new light on Appositive Relative Clauses, a structure that is generally studied from a merely syntactic point of view, in opposition to Determinative (or Restrictive) Relative Clauses. In this volume, ARCs are examined from a discourse/pragmatic point of view, independently of DRCs, in order to provide a positive definition of the structure. After a presentation of the morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of ARCs, a taxonomy of their functions in discourse is established for both written and spoken English based on the results of a corpus-based investigation. The end result is a deeper understanding of the richness of ARCs in their natural contexts of use.
