A semantic approach to English grammar
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
A semantic approach to English grammar
（Oxford textbooks in linguistics）（Oxford linguistics）
Oxford University Press, 2005
Rev. and enl. 2nd ed
- : pbk
- Other Title
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A new approach to English grammar on semantic principles
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Note
"References": p. [492]-500
Includes index
"First edition published 1991 by Oxford University Press as A new approach to English grammar on semantic principles."--T.p. verso
"Revised and enlarged second edition first published 2005."--T.p. verso
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
- PART I INTRODUCTION
- PART II THE SEMANTIC TYPES
- PART III SOME GRAMMATICAL TOPICS
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