"Buenos dias", "buenas noches" -- this was the first words in a foreign language I heard in my life, as a three-year old boy growing up in developing post-war Western Germany, where the first gastarbeiters had arrived from Spain. Fascinated by the strange sounds, I tried to get to know some more languages, the only opportunity being TV courses of English and French -- there was no foreign language education for pre-teen school children in Germany yet in those days. Read more
To find some answers Tim Machan explores the language's present and past, and looks ahead to its futures among the one and a half billion people who speak it. His search is fascinating and important, for definitions of English have influenced education and law in many countries and helped shape the identities of those who live in them.
This volume provides a new perspective on the evolution of the special language of medicine, based on the electronic corpus of Early Modern English Medical Texts, containing over two million words of medical writing from 1500 to 1700.
Over the past several decades, our knowledge of language and sentence structure has increased at a pace unparalleled in the history of linguistics. An Introduction to Syntactic Analysis and Theory provides a general introduction to our current understanding of the rules and principles that govern the syntax of natural languages.
Accessible to those with minimal knowledge of current syntactic research, it guides readers through syntactic and morphological structures in a progressive manner. To facilitate comprehension of basic principles and theories, useful 'Practice' boxes are included throughout the text, with more advanced concepts in syntactic theory also highlighted throughout. Comprehensive and authoritative, this introduction to syntactic theory takes the mystery out of one of the most crucial aspects of the workings of language -- the principles and processes behind the structure of sentences.