Adpositions: Pragmatic, Semantic and Syntactic Perspectives (Typological Studies in Language)
This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation - prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian.
An excellent work that offers support for the tenets of Chomskyan linguistics. The book offers clear insights into the workings of the human mind and would serve well as a text in developmental psychology as well as for related courses in linguistics. The arguments are lucid and the subject matter is both fascinating and central to a more complete understating of language and the mind.
Heroes is a new three-level course for teenagers which takes them from beginner to intermediate level. Every unit of Heroes is divided into three complete lessons, providing a clear progression from new language to skills work.
Word grammar is a theory of language structure and is based on the assumption that language, and indeed the whole of knowledge, is a network, and that virtually all of knowledge is learned. It combines the psychological insights of cognitive linguistics with the rigour of more formal theories. This textbook spans a broad range of topics from prototypes, activation and default inheritance to the details of syntactic, morphological and semantic structure. It introduces elementary ideas from cognitive science and uses them to explain the structure of language including a survey of English grammar.
Language As Discourse: Perspectives for Language Teaching
In this book Michael McCarthy and Ronald Carter describe the discoursal properties of language and demonstrate what insights this approach can offer to the student and teacher of language. The authors examine the relationship between complete texts, both spoken and written, and the social and cultural contexts in which they function. They argue that the functions of language are often best understood in a discoursal environment and that exploring language in context compels us to revise commonly-held understandings about the forms and meanings of language.
