In Basic Linguistic Theory R. M. W. Dixon provides a new and fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In three clearly written and accessible volumes, he describes how best to go about doing linguistics, the most satisfactory and profitable ways to work, and the pitfalls to avoid. In the first volume he addresses the methodology for recording, analysing, and comparing languages. He argues that grammatical structures and rules should be worked out inductively on the basis of evidence, explaining in detail the steps by which an attested grammar and lexicon can built up from observed utterances.
The focus of this carefully selected volume concerns the existence, frequency, and form of composite/complex predicates (the take a look construction) in earlier periods of the English language, an area of scholarship which has been virtually neglected. The various contributions seek to understand the collocational and idiomatic aspects of these structures, as well as of related structures such as complex prepositions (e.g., on account of ) and phrasal verbs (e.g., look up ), in their earliest manifestations.
Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field.
In A Syntax of Substance, David Adger proposes a new approach to phrase structure that eschews functional heads and labels structures exocentrically. His proposal simultaneously simplifies the syntactic system and restricts the range of possible structures, ruling out the ubiquitous (remnant) roll-up derivations and forcing a separation of arguments from their apparent heads. This new system has a number of empirical consequences, which Adger explores in the domain of relational nominals across different language families, including Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Polynesian, and Semitic.
English - One Step Further (Angielski - krok dalej)
An audio course in grammar and vocabulary for the learners of English at false-beginner and pre-intermediate levels. Especially tailored for the students aiming to revise basic sentence structures and common phrases. Features 18 theme units.
