Many people feel they might have a book in them-but how do you know whether you have what it takes to be a writer, whether your writing is any good, what you should write about, and whether you should dedicate proper time to begin your dream? This book asks pertinent questions of you via a questionnaire, with each chapter providing a background to the relevant point in the questionnaire. It's also packed with advice from experienced writers, including P.D. James, Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson, Margaret Drabble, Katie Fforde, and more.

These essays comprise a first attempt to assess overall the attention awarded to Leibniz’s philosophy in the English-speaking world in his own time and up to the present day.

In addition to an introductory overview there are fourteen original and previously unpublished essays considering Leibniz’s connections with his English-speaking contemporaries and near contemporaries as well as the later reception of his thought in Anglo-American philosophy. Some of the papers shed new light on familiar topics, including the influence of Hobbes on Leibniz, his relations with Locke and the well-publicised controversy with Samuel Clarke. Others chart less familiar territory, including Leibniz’s connections with Boyle and Berkeley, Wilkins and Dalgarno. And others still break new ground in considering Leibniz’s connections with John Wallis and Margaret Cavendish. There are four concluding papers on the later reception of Leibniz’s philosophy in the English-speaking world, including two on Bertrand Russell and Leibniz, and two on the reception of Leibniz by American philosophers, Peirce and Loemker.

 

This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say I wish to go, I wish that he would go, and I want to go but not I want that he would go.
The first part of the book reviews the main points of English syntax and discusses English verbs in terms of their semantic types including those of Motion, Giving, Speaking, Liking, and Trying. In the second part Professor Dixon looks at eight grammatical topics, including complement clauses, transitivity and causatives, passives, and the promotion of a non-subject to subject, as in Dictionaries sell well.
This is the updated and revised edition of A New Approach to English Grammar on Semantic Principles. It includes new chapters on tense and aspect, nominalizations and possession, and adverbs and negation, and contains a new discussion of comparative forms of adjectives. It also explains recent changes in English grammar, including how they has replaced the tabooed he as a pronoun referring to either gender, as in When a student reads this book, they will learn a lot about English grammar in a most enjoyable manner.