McGraw-Hill's Essential ESL Grammar does more than cover the basics of English; it pays special attention to those irksome subjects that trouble even native English speakers.
Mark Lester, bestselling author of the most widely used college grammar text in the country, has developed an innovative method to help you conquer tricky subjects such as articles, tense, verb complements, word order, and more.

Meaning construction pervades every aspect of our lives. A crucial aspect of our interaction in the world is being able to identify and categorize things. In his pioneering work on remembering, the British psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett (1932) confronted subjects with what would seem to be meaningless figures and asked them to remember and reproduce them.

The famously enigmatic writer-composer Paul Bowles is the subject of Millicent Dillon's unforgettable new book. Her portrait of the chameleonlike artist is much more than an account of Bowles's life, however. It is also a meditation on biography that questions the biographer's role, the subject's credibility, and the very nature of "truth" in the telling of a life.

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Overt subjects are usually considered as a property of finite clauses. However, most Romance languages permit specified subjects in a broad range of infinitive constructions. Guido Mensching analyzes this phenomenon in stages of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and other Romance varieties.

Although (almost) all sentences have subjects, not all sentences encode their subjects in the same way. Some languages overtly mark some subjects, but not others, depending on certain features of the subject argument or the sentence in which the subject figures. This phenomenon is known as Differential Subject Marking (DSM). Languages differ in which conditions govern DSM. Some languages differentiate their subjects on the basis of semantic features of the argument such as thematic role, volitionality, animacy, whereas others differentiate on the basis of clausal features such as tense/aspect and the main/dependent clause distinction. DSM comes in different formal guises: case marking, agreement, inverse systems, and voice alternations.

Relatively much is known about cross-linguistic variation in the marking of subjects, yet little attempt has been made to formalize the facts. This volume aims to unify formal approaches to language and presents both specific case studies of DSM and theoretical approaches.