front cover of The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation
The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation
Bryan A. Garner
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Few people can write on the English language with the authority of Bryan A. Garner. The author of The Chicago Manual of Style’s popular “Grammar and Usage” chapter, Garner explains the vagaries of English with absolute precision and utmost clarity. With The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, he has written the definitive guide for writers who want their prose to be both memorable and correct.

Throughout the book Garner describes standard literary English—the forms that mark writers and speakers as educated users of the language. He also offers historical context for understanding the development of these forms. The section on grammar explains how the canonical parts of speech came to be identified, while the section on syntax covers the nuances of sentence patterns as well as both traditional sentence diagramming and transformational grammar. The usage section provides an unprecedented trove of empirical evidence in the form of Google Ngrams, diagrams that illustrate the changing prevalence of specific terms over decades and even centuries of English literature. Garner also treats punctuation and word formation, and concludes the book with an exhaustive glossary of grammatical terms and a bibliography of suggested further reading and references.

The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation is a magisterial work, the culmination of Garner’s lifelong study of the English language. The result is a landmark resource that will offer clear guidelines to students, writers, and editors alike.
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Clear Grammar 4, 2nd Edition
Keys to Advanced ESL Grammar
Keith S. Folse, Deborah Mitchell, Barbara Smith-Palinkas, and Donna Tortorella
University of Michigan Press, 2013

Clear Grammar 4 introduces advanced grammar. Clear Grammar 4, 2nd Ed., includes

  • Subject-verb agreement
  • Word forms
  • Past perfect tense
  • Conditionals
  • Adverb clauses
  • Noun clauses
  • Reduction of adjective and adverb clauses (including appositives)
  • Past modals
  • Review of verb tenses

Clear Grammar 4 concludes with a review of this volume’s contents of advanced grammar points.

Clear Grammar is a four-level grammar series that features a unique combination of useful grammar information written in clear language with activities that promote more accurate and fluent writing, speaking, reading, and vocabulary usage. Important features of the new editions of Clear Grammar include:

  1. More user-friendly charts to accompany grammar explanations
  2. High-frequency, corpus-informed vocabulary related to each grammar point
  3. Grammar discovery tasks using students’ inductive learning skills
  4. A greater variety and more activities, including practice online (www.press.umich.edu/esl/compsite/cleargrammar/)
  5. Many more activities at the longer discourse level
  6. The addition of reading practice at the end, plus a critical-reading task
  7. More writing practice, including one on editing student writing and another for original student writing
  8. Two vocabulary practice activities per unit, with one on collocations; plus many one-minute lessons showing the connection between grammar and vocabulary
  9. More speaking practice, with activities that require students to speak and listen to each other while using the target grammar
  10. Support for teachers in the form of indicators that reference how to teach the grammar points in the Clear Grammar series from Keys to Teaching Grammar for English Language Learners by Keith S. Folse (978-0-472-03220-4).
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front cover of Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar
Coherence, Reference, and the Theory of Grammar
Andrew Kehler
CSLI, 2001
A natural language discourse is more than an arbitrary sequence of utterances; a discourse exhibits coherence. Despite its centrality to discourse interpretation, coherence rarely plays a role in theories of linguistic phenomena that apply across utterances.

In this book, Andrew Kehler provides an analysis of coherence relationships between utterances that is rooted in three types of 'connection among ideas' first articulated by the philosopher David Hume—Resemblance, Cause or Effect, and Contiguity. Kehler then shows how these relationships affect the distribution of a variety of linguistic phenomena, including verb phrase ellipsis, gapping, extraction from coordinate structures, tense, and pronominal reference. In each of these areas, Kehler demonstrates how the constraints imposed by linguistic form interact with those imposed by the process of establishing coherence to explain data that has eluded previous analyses. his book will be of interest to researchers from the broad spectrum of disciplines from which discourse is studied, as well as those working in syntax, semantics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, and philosophy of language.
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front cover of A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language
A Concise Elementary Grammar of the Sanskrit Language
Jan Gonda
University of Alabama Press, 2006
A standard course book for students of linguistics.
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Concreteness in Grammar
Lise Dobrin
CSLI, 2013
Based on an exhaustive search of published sources and the author’s firsthand fieldwork, Concreteness in Grammar explores the role of phonological form in the noun class systems of the Arapesh languages spoken in Papua New Guinea. Linguists have long known that formal critical play a role alongside semantics in the classification of lexical terms. In Arapesh, virtually every possible final ending of a noun is represented in the paradigm of noun class and agreement markers, reflecting an interpenetraion of sound structure and grammar that many theories would disallow as wildly unconstrained. In this book, Lise Dobrin describes these formal patterns in order to reveal their naturalness and elegance, establishing their place in a typology of noun class systems and drawing out their significance for theories of grammatical architecture.
A rigorous study of an endangered language, Concreteness in Grammar revisits the definition of a morpheme and looks at unusual language patterns to reveal the naturalness of grammar.
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A Course in Romance Linguistics
A Synchronic View, vol. 1
Frederick B. Agard
Georgetown University Press, 1984

A strictly descriptive—or synchronic—approach to romance linguistics.

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Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics
Héctor Campos and Fernando Martinez-Gil, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 1991

In this invited volume, experts in Spanish linguistics who subscribe to the Chomskyian thory of Universal Grammar, along with the editors, approach the general applicability of this model from the perspectives of their subdisciplines: language acquisition, syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology. Their research points to the verification of the Chomskyian linguistic theory as a general framework for explaining phenomena in language acquistion and use—and, more generally, to the possible development of a model of mind based on linguistic theory. Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics will interest all specialists in Spanish and theoretical linguistics, as well as those interested in cognitive science, psychology, philosophy of mind, and artificial intelligence.

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