Book picks similar to
The Leaning Tower Of Babel And Other Affronts By The Underground Grammarian by Richard Mitchell
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Onboard French: Learn a language before you land
Eton Institute - 2013
Learn the Alphabet and pronunciation as well as useful phrases in 8 categories, such as greetings, travel and directions, making friends to business and emergencies. Download, read and enjoy your vacation like never before.
Syntax: A Generative Introduction
Andrew Carnie - 2002
Includes new and extended problem sets in every chapter, all of which have been annotated for level and skill type Features three new chapters on advanced topics including vP shells, object shells, control, gapping and ellipsis and an additional chapter on advanced topics in binding Offers a brief survey of both Lexical-Functional Grammar and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar Succeeds in strengthening the reader's foundational knowledge, and prepares them for more advanced study Supported by an instructor's manual and online resources for students and instructors, available at www.blackwellpublishing.com/carnie
Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing
Mina P. Shaughnessy - 1977
This book is mainly an attempt to be precise about the types of difficulties to be found in basic writing papers and beyond that, to demonstrate how the sources of those difficulties can be explained without recourse to such empty terms as 'handicapped' or 'disadvantaged.' This book is divided into sections of difficulty such as, handwriting and punctuation, syntax, common errors, spelling, vocabulary, and beyond the sentence.
History in English Words
Owen Barfield - 1926
History in English Words, his classic historical excursion through the English language, is now back in print after five years.This popular book provides a brief, brilliant history of those who have spoken the Indo-European tongues. It is illustrated throughout by current English words—whose derivation from other languages, whose history in use and changes of meaning—record and unlock the larger history."In our language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust.... Language has preserved for us the inner, living history of our soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness" (Owen Barfield).About the Author:Owen Barfield (1898-1997), British philosopher and critic, has been called the "First and Last Inkling" because of his influential and enduring role in the group known as the Oxford Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. It was Barfield who first advanced the ideas about language, myth, and belief that became identified with the thought and art of the Inklings. He is the author of numerous books, including Poetic Diction; Romanticism Comes of Age; Unancestoral Voice; History, Guilt, and Habit; and Worlds Apart, as well as works of fiction and poetry. His history of the evolution of human consciousness, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, achieved a place in the list of the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the Century."
Language and Symbolic Power
Pierre Bourdieu - 1982
Bourdieu develops a forceful critique of traditional approaches to language, including the linguistic theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by Austin and others. He argues that language should be viewed not only as a means of communication but also as a medium of power through which individuals pursue their own interests and display their practical competence.Drawing on the concepts that are part of his distinctive theoretical approach, Bourdieu maintains that linguistic utterances or expressions can be understood as the product of the relation between a "linguistic market" and a "linguistic habitus." When individuals use language in particular ways, they deploy their accumulated linguistic resources and implicitly adapt their words to the demands of the social field or market that is their audience. Hence every linguistic interaction, however personal or insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of the social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce.Bourdieu's account sheds fresh light on the ways in which linguistic usage varies according to considerations such as class and gender. It also opens up a new approach to the ways in which language is used in the domain of politics. For politics is, among other things, the arena in which words are deeds and the symbolic character of power is at stake.This volume, by one of the leading social thinkers in the world today, represents a major contribution to the study of language and power. It will be of interest to students throughout the social sciences and humanities, especially in sociology, politics, anthropology, linguistics, and literature.
The Subversive Copy Editor: Advice from Chicago (or, How to Negotiate Good Relationships with Your Writers, Your Colleagues, and Yourself)
Carol Fisher Saller - 2009
Some are arcane, some simply hilarious—and one editor, Carol Fisher Saller, reads every single one of them. All too often she notes a classic author-editor standoff, wherein both parties refuse to compromise on the "rights" and "wrongs" of prose styling: "This author is giving me a fit." "I wish that I could just DEMAND the use of the serial comma at all times." "My author wants his preface to come at the end of the book. This just seems ridiculous to me. I mean, it’s not a post-face."In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller casts aside this adversarial view and suggests new strategies for keeping the peace. Emphasizing habits of carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, she shows copy editors how to build an environment of trust and cooperation. One chapter takes on the difficult author; another speaks to writers themselves. Throughout, the focus is on serving the reader, even if it means breaking "rules" along the way. Saller’s own foibles and misadventures provide ample material: "I mess up all the time," she confesses. "It’s how I know things."Writers, Saller acknowledges, are only half the challenge, as copy editors can also make trouble for themselves. (Does any other book have an index entry that says "terrorists. See copy editors"?) The book includes helpful sections on e-mail etiquette, work-flow management, prioritizing, and organizing computer files. One chapter even addresses the special concerns of freelance editors.Saller’s emphasis on negotiation and flexibility will surprise many copy editors who have absorbed, along with the dos and don’ts of their stylebooks, an attitude that their way is the right way. In encouraging copy editors to banish their ignorance and disorganization, insecurities and compulsions, the Chicago Q&A presents itself as a kind of alter ego to the comparatively staid Manual of Style. In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller continues her mission with audacity and good humor.
Foyle's Philavery
Christopher Foyle - 2007
Some of these words appeal because of their aptness, some for their obscurity, some for their euphony, and some for their quirkiness.
The Novel: A Biography
Michael Schmidt - 2014
Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, "Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature," Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but "artist practitioners," men and women who feel "hot love" for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliche--some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages."
Second Language Learning Theories
Rosamond Mitchell - 1998
In this new edition, new studies have been incorporated and the evaluation sections in each chapter have been expanded, ensuring that the book remains as fresh, engaging and useful as the day it was first published.
Uplift: Secrets from the Sisterhood of Breast Cancer Survivors
Barbara Delinsky - 2001
This updated edition features new material.
A Mouthful of Air: Languages and Language, Especially English
Anthony Burgess - 1992
Anthony Burgess covers everything from Shakespeare's pronunciation, to the politics of speech, to the place of English in the world, and more.
They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases
Howard Rheingold - 1988
From the North Pole to New Guinea, from Easter Island to Tibet, Howard Rheingold explores more than forty familiar and obscure languages to discover genuinely useful (rather than simply odd) words that can open up new ways of understanding and experience life.
An Introductory English Grammar
Norman C. Stageberg - 1977
In the fifth edition of this renowned advanced grammar textbook, the new author Dallin D. Oaks of Brigham Young University has preserved Stageberg's clear and concise linguistic approach to grammar instruction while updating the text for the 1990s advanced grammar student. Updated chapter material includes revised examples of an exercises for the material studied and the use of tree diagrams. In addition, the fifth edition emphasizes the significance of English grammar in speech and composition in two new chapters: Usage and Language Variation: Historical, Regional, and Social. Two new appendices--A Basic Introduction to Tree Diagramming and An Introduction to Transformational Grammar--provide further instruction regarding the use of tree diagrams and an overview of Transformational Generative-Grammar. As in previous editions, AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH GRAMMAR, Fifth Edition, provides a linguistic approach to grammar instruction that can be used to teach both advanced grammar and composition as well as non-major introductory linguistics courses.
The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had
Susan Wise Bauer - 2003
In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.
Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language
Douglas R. Hofstadter - 1997
Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once. In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's
Eugene Onegin
, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's
Catcher in the Rye
, Villon's Ballades, Nabokov’s essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today’s computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.