Product Description
Presents the fundamental rules of grammar, covering sentence structure, parts of speech, common errors, and more. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Makes learning grammar fun!
Not just another dry grammar book, this book has fun activities that will have you hunting for parts of speech and grammatical errors.There is everything from art projects to scavenger hunts.In addition to the partsof speech, you will learn about common errors made in the English language. Great book! ... Read more

Product Description
Boiled-down essentials of the top-selling Schaum's Outline series for the student with limited time

What could be better than the bestselling Schaum's Outline series? For students looking for a quick nuts-and-bolts overview, it would have to be Schaum's Easy Outline series. Every book in this series is a pared-down, simplified, and tightly focused version of its predecessor. With an emphasis on clarity and brevity, each new title features a streamlined and updated format and the absolute essence of the subject, presented in a concise and readily understandable form.

Graphic elements such as sidebars, reader-alert icons, and boxed highlights stress selected points from the text, illuminate keys to learning, and give students quick pointers to the essentials.

• Designed to appeal to underprepared students and readers turned off by dense text
• Cartoons, sidebars, icons, and other graphic pointers get the material across fast
• Concise text focuses on the essence of the subject
• Delivers expert help from teachers who are authorities in their fields
• Perfect for last-minute test preparation
• So small and light that they fit in a backpack!

Customer Reviews (3)

Writing and Grammar
This is a good book for quick review of grammar and the writing process. It is a crash course requiring minimum learning time, with tips for mastering the writing process. Anybody short of time, and studying for an English exam should read this book. Good value for money.

Excellent resource for those needing to know 'right now'.
If time is a premium (and when isn't it for a student?) this is the book to get.Clear, concise, and to the point.It is student friendly, and definitely gives you what you need to know to pass the course.'Two thumbs way up!'

There is no "collectible"edition
I see someone is offering a "collectible" edition of this book for over $13 (as of April 2002); it is also advertised as being the "UK" edition.This is a book of American grammar--there *is* no UK edition.There isn't any special "collectible" version either--itdoesn't come in hardcover, it doesn't come signed by the authors, it doesn't come with an audio tape, it doesn't come with a workbook, it doesn't come with pop-up pictures of the sentence parts.As one of the authors, I know!So if you want a copy, get one of the "normal" ones at the normal price.

Dorothy Zemach

P.S.I would have submitted this review w/out stars, but that wasn't an option.So of course I picked 5! ... Read more

Product Description
This outstanding resource for students offers a step-by-step, practical introduction to English syntax and syntactic principles, as developed by Chomsky over the past 15 years. Assuming little or no prior background in syntax, Andrew Radford outlines the core concepts and how they can be used to describe various aspects of English sentence structure. This is an abridged version of Radford's major new textbook Analysing English Sentences (also published by Cambridge University Press), and will be welcomed as a handy introduction to current syntactic theory. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The worst linguistics book I was ever forced to buy, or use.
This book had many obtuse examples that did not support the points being made.It wandered all over the place with no real organized format.There was no stepping stone approach.Frequently the examples were gramatically incorrect.The professor spent more time in clas explaining what Radford meant than teaching new material.I can honestly say that in all the text books I have ourchased for my 130 hours of college credit this was the worst to work from.There were major gramatical errors every 1-2 pages.Many topic were explained with no further reasoning than "Becase I said so."The author assumed that the reader was going to continue on for a doctorate and not e sitting in a sophmore class struggling to come to terms with his difficult jargon.The professor I had for this course ultimately decided to drop the book after one semester, ... Read more

Product Description
Syntax deals with the whole of syntax--from immediate constituents and relations between sentences--and examines concepts such as ``subject'' and ``object,'' ``agent'' and ``patient,'' ``topic,'' and ``comment'' and ``theme.'' Also included is a section on morphology and a discussion of its relationship to syntax. As the book includes graded exercises which can be taught either in class or used independently, the volume is designed to train students of either linguistics or language to understand and make the best use of any grammar they encounter. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (5)

as it was showed
i received the product on time, in good conditions, as it was supposed to be according to the seller, so i cant complain.

A Classic
This is a classic look at English language structures that can be very useful for anyone teaching English to speakers of other languages. While the "habit formation" psychology of audio lingual method has been eclipsed by more cognitive approaches, it is still very likely that English speakers regularly use and reuse a definable body of structures. This group of patterns is very large, but it is finite. Chomsky did us a disfavor when he said that all language is infinitely creative. Theoretically, yes, but given that we don't invent whole new structures every time we speak or write, it may be useful to introduce language learners to the ones that occur most frequently. This book is a veritable catalog of the most frequently used sentence patterns of English, and very useful to the teacher trying to offer their students immediately useful target language.

A must for private English teachers
I have used this book to build lessons.Not from the text but from the information it gives you.It explains grammar you have never really thought about, and makes it easy to understand. If you use this book for drills it is great for a warm-up or filling the last few minutes with a good speaking drill.

I liked this book so much I have two of them..
I have bought 3 (I loaned it to a friend and he kept it!).

Must Have Resource! Keep it on standby and it will never fail you!

Excellent Sequence
This book has the upmost technique to explain and teach English as a second language from beginning levels to very advanced.

English Sentence Structure by Robert Krohn
Eureka! I found the best English grammar book at last. The author successfully dissected and analyzed even the most confusing sentece structure.I have read and studied a lot of books to give me confidence inspeaking English as my second language and none of them satisfied me likethis book.I recommend it to everyone ! I am grateful for Mr. R. Krohnfor sharing his knowledge. ... Read more

Product Description
Improving Sentence Structure teaches self-editing skills that help the writer avoid common writing problems like sentence fragments and run-on sentences. Sentences are the building blocks of good writing. People who struggle with writing sentences will obviously struggle when they are expected to write paragraphs or essays. A firm grasp of basic sentence structure allows writers to say what they mean in a way that others can easily understand. ... Read more

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Sentence Structure:

Customer Reviews (1)

A False Language Workbook
"Sentence Structure" should help us become familiar with English morphology. Nigel Fabb addresses those who are still unaware of terms like 'sentence', 'noun', 'article', 'adjective' etc. And still, the book is ambivalent. On the one hand, it is a false language workbook. I personally deal with morphology in four other languages, but I doubt that a newcomer would easily find his way here; Moreover, about half of the tasks included in this book do not have an answer key. On the other hand, 20 pages out of 104 are dedicated to comparative sentence structure in Korean, Madi, Malay, Tamil etc.

Before publishing the next edition of this book, I think that the editor should take a painful decision:
(a) Is this a course in comparative morphology?
(b) Is this a language workbook?

I think that in 104 pages one is too ambitious to try and do both.

Raluca Zakheim, MA Comp. Lit, Israel
... Read more

Product Description
Why do languages have so many different ways of expressing the same idea? Lambrecht addresses this question through an investigation of the "information structure" of sentences. His analysis is based on the observation that the structure of a sentence reflects a speaker's assumptions about the hearer's state of knowledge and consciousness at the time of the utterance. Four independent but interrelated categories are analyzed: presupposition and assertion, identifiability and activation, topic, and focus. ... Read more

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An Introduction to English Sentence Structure puts the study of English sentences into the meaningful perspective provided by the broad essentials of functionalism. The book starts from the premise that the structure of language reflects the structure of events in everyday experience. By contrast, grammars that are more structural in nature often begin with gross facts about language structure, such as the observation that clauses can be divided into subjects and predicates. The book's premise reflects the fundamental Hallidayan principle that language simultaneously codes for three dimensions of structure: clause as representation, clause as exchange, and clause as message. This approach has the effect of situating the study of language in the student's familiar world of ideas, relationships, and discourses.The book blends insights from three prominent modern schools of grammatical thought (functionalism, structuralism, and generativism) using functionalism as the philosophical and organizational motif. The book focuses on the representational function of language, encouraging students to use their knowledge of the way the world works to understand how language works. The approach taken is hybrid: It assumes that form matters, and in this sense it is structural. It also assumes that forms follows function, and in this sense it is functional.As its subtitle suggests, the book is concerned with the argument structure of clauses, the boundary markers of clause combinations, and the syntactic and experiential resources that permit language users to supply the content of empty categories, the missing elements. ... Read more

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This book is the first line-by-line analysis of enjambement and verse-internal breaks throughout the entire Iliad. Addressing larger, stylistic questions concerning genre, effect, and the manipulation and enjambing of formulae, Higbie examines a wide range of literary structures, including speeches, similes, battle scenes, and catalogues.A fundamental and thorough examination of enjambement in Homeric verse, this work will become a standard reference for scholars and students of Homer. ... Read more

Product Description
This book contains 14 articles by Teun Hoekstra (1953-1998) on core issues in syntactic theory. Some articles focus on the structure of DP, others on the structure of the sentence as a whole, while others still deal explicitly with the parallels between the two. The papers are distributed over four sections: "Argument structure", "T-chains", "The morphosyntax of verbal and nominal projections" and "Small clauses". More than half of the articles in this book are published here for the first time or appear for the first time in English. Hoekstra's work is characterized by a fundamental interest in the central questions of syntactic theory, most notably the relation between argument structure and X-bar structure. This concentrated interest led to a deep understanding of the notion of transitivity, with respect to both the status of the external argument and that of the internal argument, where "status" refers to both the content and the licensing. In this collection of papers, Hoekstra reports on his insights in these matters.As far as content and licensing of the external argument is concerned, this collection contains papers on the relation between passives and their active counterparts, the parallels between possessives and transitives and the differences and similarities between past participles and infinitives. As to the internal argument, we find papers addressing sentential complementation, verbal affixation and resultatives. And there is a whole section on tense, and its role in keeping the sentence together. One of the papers in this collection is Hoekstra's classic, but hitherto unpublished "Small clauses everywhere" (more than 70 pages), which summarizes Hoekstra's views on such issues as resultatives, particle verbs and double object constructions. ... Read more

Product Description
Although Hittitologists have devoted a number of important studies to syntax, they have usually shown little if any interest in the possible implications of their research for linguistic theory, and have made little use of theoretical tools in their description. Moreover, Hittite syntax deserves more attention from general linguists, especially typologists, than it has received until now. The purpose of this book is to bridge the gap that has developed between general studies on syntax on the one hand, and philological studies on Hittite grammar on the other. The book is divided into a first part, which describes the relevant data from the corpus, and a second part, which contains a discussion of the data from different points of view: language typology, pragmatics, and proto-Indo-European reconstruction. ... Read more

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In this study Michael Covington considers the origins and development of the theories of sentence structure formulated by the Modistae, a group of grammarians and logicians who flourished in Paris between about 1270 and 1310. Some of the concepts of the medieval theoretical framework, notably government and dependency, have survived to the present day, and Dr Covington introduces insights from modern grammatical theories where appropriate. Nevertheless his principal aim is not to compare medieval and modern theories, or to provide a comprehensive historical study. Rather, recognising that 'it is the difference as much as the similarity that makes the Modistae interesting', Dr Covington offers an original critical exegesis of these influential theories. The book will be accessible both to linguists who may know little about medieval philosophy and to medievalists who may know little about linguistics. ... Read more