The subject of this book is of historical and contemporary importance. The canard that ours is an unsentimental and even anti-sentimental culture has been advanced by influential twentiethcentury opinion makers. In modern high culture, sentimentality is often thought of as vaguely embarrassing or is condemned for being in bad taste or for being insincere.

The languages belonging to the British subgroup of Celtic, i.e. Welsh, Cornish and Breton, have been the subject of thorough research for over a century now. Yet the phonological history of the prehistoric stages of these languages and the details of their connection with the other Celtic and Indo-European languages still present numerous unsolved issues. This volume aims to tackle the most acute problems of the historical phonology of British Celtic.

Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory is a textbook, written for introductory courses in linguistic theory for undergraduate linguistics majors and first-year graduate students, by twelve major figures in the field, each bringing their expertise to one of the core areas of the field - morphology, syntax, semantics, phonetics, phonology, and language acquisition. In each section the book is concerned with discussing the underlying principles common to all languages, showing how these are revealed in language acquisition and in the specific grammars of the world's languages.

Based on four historical corpora, the book is a comprehensive study of the demise of five preterite-present verbs in English. It offers a detailed description of their distribution in Old and Middle English. The subsequent comparison of the forms and uses of the preterite-presents in the two periods allows the author to suggest the reasons for their elimination from the language. The discussion focuses on phonological and morphological changes the verbs underwent as well as on the syntactic structures they appeared in.

William Shakespeare: A Very Peculiar History explores the life and works of the widely-regarded greatest writer of the English language. We learn about Shakespeare's family and childhood, and, with much reference to his most famous works, why his writing has endured the test of time and remains endlessly adaptable.