Little but very useful picture dictionary.Effective for teaching vocabulary.Words are grouped together in different themes,provided with colour illustrations and defining sentences.The sentences are examples of the words usage too.
Gerry's Vocabulary Teacher is a huge resource for teachers of English. The database contains more than 34,000 sentences illustrating over 2,500 headwords, with at least 10 sentences for each word. Using the database, you can quickly and easily create practice exercises or find example sentences for the vocabulary your students are working on right now.
Included among the headword is the vocabulary contained in the Academic Word List, as developed at the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.
From Gerry's Vocabulary Database Help File. c
opyright Gerry Luton and Martin Holmes, Creative Technology 2002.
How to Do Things With Words is perhaps Austin's most influential work. In it he attacks what was at his time a predominant account in philosophy, namely, the view that the chief business of sentences is to state facts, and thus to be true or false based on the truth or falsity of those facts. In contrast to this common view, he argues, truth-evaluable sentences form only a small part of the range of utterances. After introducing several kinds of sentences which he assumes are indeed not truth-evaluable, he turns in particular to one of these kinds of sentences, which he deems performative utterances. These he characterises by two features:
* First, to utter one of these sentences is not just to "say" something, but rather to perform a certain kind of action.
* Second, these sentences are not true or false; rather, when something goes wrong in connection with the utterance then the utterance is, as he puts it, "infelicitous", or "unhappy."
The action which performative sentences 'perform' when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act (more particularly, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act). For example, if you say “I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth," and the circumstances are appropriate in certain ways, then you will have done something special, namely, you will have performed the act of naming the ship. Other examples include: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded husband," used in the course of a marriage ceremony, or "I bequeath this watch to my brother," as occurring in a will. In all three cases the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is 'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.
"Wordbank" — a collection of sentences from English-language books, articles, conversations, etc. The Wordbank is part of the "Bank of English", a much larger collection which used to create the definitions and choose the example sentences in the dictionary
