In a Word: 750 Words and Their Fascinating Stories and Origins
This fun book contains 750 word origins written in a witty short-story style. Many of the words are accompanied by "P.S.'s," that provide details about a word's history and usage. Witty illustrations by Tom Lopes showcase many of the words' visual connections. The book comes with a language chart, an index, and an introduction by a linguistics scholar.
The Origins of Grammar: Language in the Light of Evolution II
This is the second of the two closely linked but self-contained volumes that comprise James Hurford's acclaimed exploration of the biological evolution of language. In the first book he looked at the evolutionary origins of meaning, ending as our distant ancestors were about to step over the brink to modern language. He now considers how that step might have been taken and the consequences it undoubtedly had. The capacity for language lets human beings formulate and express an unlimited range of propositions about real or fictitious worlds.
Another investigation for Miss Silver. Lurking beneath the tranquillity of the country village of Greenings is a tinder-dry passion which owes its origins to events in the recent past. When Clarice Dean is found drowned in a watersplash, the match is set. Can Miss Silver put out the blaze?
The Origins of Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension
How do children achieve adult grammatical competence? How do they induce syntactical rules from the bewildering linguistic input that surrounds them? The major debates in language acquisition theory today focus not on whether there are some sensitivities to syntactic information but rather which sensitivities are available to children and how they might be translated into the organizing principles that get syntactic learning off the ground.
Added by: Kahena | Karma: 11526.37 | Fiction literature | 22 January 2012
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Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
