Teachers' Library

The second edition of this successful text provides an ideal introduction for university students of English at the intermediate level. Students planning papers, dissertations or theses will find the book a particularly valuable guide.  After introducing corpora and the rationale and basic methodology of corpus linguistics, the authors present a number of recent case studies providing new insights into vocabulary, collocations, phraseology, metaphor and metonymy, syntactic structures, male and female language, and language change. A final chapter shows how the web and social media can be used as a source for linguistic investigations and contains information on how to compile your own corpus. Each chapter includes study questions, exercises and updated suggestions for further reading.  Click here to download

What do speakers of English know in order to produce utterances that other speakers will understand? Construction Grammar explains how knowledge of language is organized in speakers' minds. The central and radical claim of Construction Grammar is that linguistic knowledge can be fully described as knowledge of constructions, which are defined as symbolic units that connect a linguistic form with meaning.  The implications of this claim are far-reaching: in Construction Grammar, not only lexical items, but also syntactic patterns are seen as symbolic, meaningful units. Instead of being meaningless structural templates, syntactic patterns actively contribute to the overall meaning of an utterance. Knowledge of language is thought of as a vast repository of interrelated symbolic units, and nothing else in addition.  This book expands on this idea and familiarizes readers with the central concepts of Construction Grammar, as applied to English constructions. In the process, it exp...

Are the dialects of England disappearing in the wake of globalisation and Estuary English , or are geographical differences as strong as ever? Joan Beal looks at recent research into regional variation in England, discusses the evidence for dialect levelling and argues that, despite this, features of dialect are still clear markers of regional and local identity.  Chapters outlining the main regional differences in accent, dialect grammar and dialect vocabulary are followed by discussions of research into geographical diffusion, levelling, issues of identity and stereotypes. Each chapter is accompanied by either an exercise based on data provided, a data-gathering exercise using methodological tools provided, or an extract from a media article provided to provoke discussion.  The book also includes a guide to resources available for the study of regional dialects in England. Features: * An up-to-date account of research into regional variation in England * A practical, hands o...

Description JEREMY SMITH, SIMON HOROBINDesigned to provide undergraduate students of English historical linguistics with a concise description of the language during the period 1100-1500. Middle English is discussed in relation to both earlier and later stages in the history of English, and in relation to other languages. Click here to download

Some twenty years ago it was widely believed that nothing much happened to the English language since the beginning of the eighteenth century. Recent research has shown that this is far from true, and this book offers an introduction to a period that forms the tail end of the standardisation process (codification and prescription), during which important social changes such as the Industrial Revolution are reflected in the language.  Late Modern English is currently receiving a lot of scholarly attention, mainly as a result of new developments in sociohistorical linguistics and corpus linguistics. By drawing on such research the present book offers a much fuller account of the language of the period than was previously possible.  It is designed for students and beginning scholars interested in Late Modern English.  Click here to download

Providing a clear and accessible introduction to the linguistic study of meaning, the second edition of this bestselling textbook outlines the meaning potential (semantics) of English and how language knowledge is put to use (pragmatics). As well as gaining a systematic overview of meaning in English, readers can learn how to argue for analyses. Among the significant concepts introduced are denotation, sense relations, event types, explicature, implicature, presupposition, metaphor, reference, speech acts and (at an elementary level) Generalised Quantifier Theory. Sense relations - such as antonymy and hyponymy - are presented as summarising patterns of entailment. The sense of a word is seen as the contributions it makes to the entailments carried by sentences.  The chapters cover adjective, noun and verb meanings, situation types, figurative language, tense, aspect, modality, quantification, topic and focus. Explanations of entailment, compositionality and scope provide a foundat...

This textbook is designed for use on ten- or twelve-week introductory courses on English phonology of the sort taught in the first year of many English Language and Linguistics degrees, in British and American  universities.  Students on such courses can struggle with phonetics and phonology; it is sometimes difficult to see past the new symbols and  terminology, and the apparent assumption that we can immediately  become consciously aware of movements of the vocal organs which we have been making almost automatically for the last eighteen or more years.  This book attempts to show students why we need to know about phonetics and phonology, if we are interested in language and our knowledge of it, as well as introducing the main units and concepts we  require to describe speech sounds accurately.  Click here to download 

Product description The second edition of this distinguished textbook introduces undergraduates to the concepts, terminology and representations needed for an understanding of how English is pronounced around the world.  Assuming no prior knowledge, this textbook guides the reader through the vocal tract and explains how the sounds of speech are made, offering an accessible and expanded introduction to areas including transcription, vowels and acoustic analysis. As far as possible, it uses naturally-occurring conversational speech so that readers are familiar with the details of everyday talk (and not just the careful pronunciations presented in dictionaries.) The book also includes a new concluding chapter that works through a piece of spoken data to show the reader how a more complete phonetic analysis can be conducted.  Examples are taken from around the English-speaking world, including North America, Australia, New Zealand and varieties of British English. The book takes ...

Product description An Introduction to Early Modern English [Edinburgh Textbooks on the English Language] [Edinburgh University Press,2008] [Paperback] About the Author Terttu Nevalainen is Professor of English Philology at the University of Helsinki, and has taught the history of English in Finland and in England. She is currently the director of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English and takes an active interest in developing electronic text corpora for linguistic research.  Click here to download  

Phonological evolution is a major component of the overall history of the language; the subject matter is both significant on its own terms and relevant in curricular terms.  This book describes the segmental and prosodic changes in the history of English, provides analyses of these changes both as phonological events and in relation to the evolution of interlocking aspects of earlier English and highlights the relevance of the topics and possibly generate further interest by projecting historical phonological change onto Present-Day English and its varieties.  The development of the English sound system is probably the best studied part of the history of the language, however no up-to-date, student-friendly survey exists: this book fills the gap.  Click here to download