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A Gateway to Sindarin
A Grammar of an Elvish Language from JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings
David Salo
University of Utah Press, 2004

From the 1910s to the 1970s, author and linguist J. R. R. Tolkien worked at creating plausibly realistic languages to be used by the creatures and characters in his novels. Like his other languages, Sindarin was a new invention, not based on any existing or artificial language. By the time of his death, he had established fairly complete descriptions of two languages, the "elvish" tongues Quenya and Sindarin. He was able to compose poetic and prose texts in both, and he also constructed a lengthy sequence of changes for both from an ancestral "proto-language," comparable to the development of historical languages and capable of analysis with the techniques of historical linguistics.

In A Gateway to Sindarin, David Salo has created a volume that is a serious look at an entertaining topic. Salo covers the grammar, morphology, and history of the language. Supplemental material includes a vocabulary, Sindarin names, a glossary of terms, and an annotated list of works relevant to Sindarin. What emerges is an homage to Tolkien's scholarly philological efforts.

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A Grammar and Dictionary of the Timucua Language
Julian Granberry
University of Alabama Press, 1993

Taken from the surviving contemporary documentary sources, Julian Granberry's volume describes the grammar and lexicon for the extinct 17th-century Timucua language of Central and North Florida and traces the origins of the 17th-century Timucua speakers and their language. Originally privately published in 1987, with limited circulation, this is the only available publication on the Timucuan language. It provides full grammatical analysis and complete lexical data, and it synthesizes both linguistic and archaeological data in order to provide a coherent picture of the Timucua peoples. Granberry traces the probable historical origins of Timucua speakers to a central Amazonian homeland at approximately 2,500 B.C. and proposes that Timucua speakers were responsible for introducing ceramic wares into North America.

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Grammar and Discourse Principles
Functional Syntax and GB Theory
Susumu Kuno and Ken-ichi Takami
University of Chicago Press, 1993
In Grammar and Discourse Principles, Susumu Kuno and Ken-ichi Takami critically examine recent work in the Government and Binding framework developed by Chomsky, Rizzi, Lasnik and Saito, Huang, Aoun, and others. They demonstrate that this work encounters a variety of empirical and theoretical difficulties when confronted by an expanded range of data. Alternatively, the authors offer independently motivated functional explanations that account for these data and that do not require postulation of concepts like "L-marking" and "blocking category."

Kuno and Takami begin by looking at extraction phenomena, including extraction from complement clauses, the overt subject requirement, and subjacency, and provide functional accounts that improve on the Barriers analysis. Next, they discuss multiple wh questions in English and Japanese, with special reference to why and naze. The authors also examine and ultimately reject the major arguments in support of Larson's "light predicate raising" analysis. Finally, Kuno and Takami discuss coreferentiality of picture noun reflexives and the relation of quantifier scope interpretations, particularly those in sentences involving psychological verbs such as bother, worry, and please.

In this subtly argued book, the authors raise questions of critical importance for theoretical linguists of all persuasions.
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Grammar Crammer
How to Write Perfect Sentences
Judi Kesselman-Turkel and Franklynn Peterson
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003

The Grammar Crammer is a concise, sensible grammar handbook that explains lucidly how to remember correct word forms and sentence structures. Useful as a reference tool for high school and beyond, it packs an entire grammar encyclopedia into just over a hundred pages.

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Grammar, Geometry, and Brain
Jens Erik Fenstad
CSLI, 2010

This original study considers the effects of language and meaning on the brain. Jens Erik Fenstad—an expert in the fields of recursion theory, nonstandard analysis, and natural language semantics—combines current formal semantics with a geometric structure in order to trace how common nouns, properties, natural kinds, and attractors link with brain dynamics.

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Grammar Lessons
Translating a Life in Spain
Michele Morano
University of Iowa Press, 2007
In the thirteen personal essays in Grammar Lessons, Michele Morano connects the rules of grammar to the stories we tell to help us understand our worlds. Living and traveling in Spain during a year of teaching English to university students, she learned to translate and interpret her past and present worlds—to study the surprising moments of communication—as a way to make sense of language and meaning, longing and memory.
    Morano focuses first on her year of living in Oviedo, in the early 1990s, a time spent immersing herself in a new culture and language while working through the relationship she had left behind with an emotionally dependent and suicidal man. Next, after subsequent trips to Spain, she explores the ways that travel sparks us to reconsider our personal histories in the context of larger historical legacies. Finally, she turns to the aftereffects of travel, to the constant negotiations involved in retelling and understanding the stories of our lives. Throughout she details one woman’s journey through vocabulary and verb tense toward a greater sense of her place in the world.
    Grammar Lessons illustrates the difficulty and delight, humor and humility of living in a new language and of carrying that pivotal experience forward. Michele Morano’s beautifully constructed essays reveal the many grammars and many voices that we collect, and learn from, as we travel.
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A Grammar of Akajeru
Fragments of a Traditional North Andamanese Dialect
Raoul Zamponi and Bernard Comrie
University College London, 2021
A definitive guide to an almost extinct North Andamanese language.
 
Originally spoken across the northern Andamanese Islands in the Bay of Bengal, the Akajeru language is spoken today by only three people. A Grammar of Akajeru describes this unique grammatical system as it was reported at the turn of the twentieth century. Based primarily on research conducted by Victorian anthropologists Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown and Edward Horace Man, this book offers a linguistic analysis of all extant Akajeru material as well as the scant documentation of adjacent dialects Akabo and Akakhora. This volume includes a grammatical sketch of Akajeru, an English-Akajeru lexicon, and a comparison between Akajeru and present-day Andamanese.
 
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A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian
R. M. W. Dixon
University of Chicago Press, 1988
The people who live in the Boumaa region of the Fijian island of Taveuni speak a dialect of Fijian that is mutually intelligible with Standard Fijian, the two differing as much perhaps as do the American and British varieties of English. During 1985, R. M. W. Dixon—one of the most insightful of linguists engaged in descriptive studies today—lived in the village of Waitabu and studied the language spoken there. He found in Boumaa Fijian a wealth of striking features unknown in commonly studied languages and on the basis of his fieldwork prepared this grammar.

Fijian is an agglutinating language, one in which words are formed by the profligate combining of morphemes. There are no case inflections, and tense and aspect as shown by independent clitics or words within a predicate complex. Most verbs come in both transitive and intransitive forms, and nouns can be build up regularly from verbal parts and verbs from nouns. The language is also marked by a highly developed pronoun system and by a vocabulary rich in areas of social significance.

In the opening chapters, Dixon describes the Islands' political, social, and linguistic organization, outlines the main points of Fijian phonology, and presents an overview of the grammar. In succeeding chapters, he examines a number of grammatical topics in greater detail, including clause and phrase structure, verbal syntax, deictics, and anaphora. The volume also includes a full vocabulary of all forms treated in discussion and three of the fifteen texts recorded from monolingual village elders on which the grammar is based.
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A Grammar of Mam, A Mayan Language
By Nora C. England
University of Texas Press, 1983

This is the first full-length reference grammar of Mam, a Mayan language spoken today by over 400,000 people in the western highlands of Guatemala and the state of Chiapas, Mexico. The result of over three years of extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, A Grammar of Mam, a Mayan Language is based on the dialect of Mam spoken by 12,000 people in San Ildefonso Ixtahuacan in the department of Huehuetenango, Guatemala.

England organizes A Grammar of Mam according to two complementary principles: to analyze Mam following basically traditional levels of grammatical description and to present material in such a way that the background information necessary for understanding each topic of discussion shall have been previously provided. Accordingly, England's analysis of the sound system and morphophonemic processes of Mam is followed by a description of the characteristics of root, inflectional, and derivational morphology. Chapters on phrase structure precede two chapters on sentence-level syntax.

A Grammar of Mam is of particular interest in analyzing a Mayan language that is both syntactically and morphologically ergative and that is innovative in the direction of strengthening the ergative system. Indeed at all levels of linguistic organization Mam is innovative, and for this reason it is uniquely interesting both historically and theoretically.

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A Grammar Of Misantla Totonac
Carolyn Mackay
University of Utah Press, 1999

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A Grammar of Murder
Violent Scenes and Film Form
Karla Oeler
University of Chicago Press, 2009

The dark shadows and offscreen space that force us to imagine violence we cannot see. The real slaughter of animals spliced with the fictional killing of men. The missing countershot from the murder victim’s point of view. Such images, or absent images, Karla Oeler contends, distill how the murder scene challenges and changes film. 

Reexamining works by such filmmakers as Renoir, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Jarmusch, and Eisenstein, Oeler traces the murder scene’s intricate connections to the great breakthroughs in the theory and practice of montage and the formulation of the rules and syntax of Hollywood genre. She argues that murder plays such a central role in film because it mirrors, on multiple levels, the act of cinematic representation. Death and murder at once eradicate life and call attention to its former existence, just as cinema conveys both the reality and the absence of the objects it depicts. But murder shares with cinema not only this interplay between presence and absence, movement and stillness: unlike death, killing entails the deliberate reduction of a singular subject to a disposable object. Like cinema, it involves a crucial choice about what to cut and what to keep.

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The Grammar of Negation
Jong-Bok Kim
CSLI, 2000
This book addresses three fundamental questions in the study of negation: What are the main ways of expressing sentential negation? What are the distributional properties of lexically-encoded negative elements? And, what implications do the answers to these two questions have for the theory of grammar? In answering these questions, Jong-Bok Kim investigates various aspects of negation in Korean, English, French and Italian. Addressing both empirical and theoretical issues relating to negation in these languages, he develops a nonderivational, lexicalist analysis within the constraint-based framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. This work demonstrates that a constraint-based approach can capture the distributional possibilities of negative elements and explain related phenomena simply through their lexical properties and the interaction of the elementary morphosyntactic and valence properties of syntactic heads. The resulting constraint-based theory allows a conservative division of labor between morphology and syntax.
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A Grammar of Paraguayan Guarani,
Bruno Estigarribia
University College London, 2020
The history of Guarani is a history of resilience. Paraguayan Guarani is a vibrant, modern language, mother tongue to millions of people in South America. It is the only indigenous language in the Americas spoken by a non-ethnically-indigenous majority, and since 1992, it is also an official language of Paraguay alongside Spanish. This book provides the first comprehensive reference grammar of Modern Paraguayan Guarani written for an English-language audience. It is an accessible yet thorough and carefully substantiated description of the language’s phonology, morphosyntax, and semantics. It also includes information about its centuries of documented history and its current sociolinguistic situation.
 
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A Grammar of Ugaritic
John Screnock
SBL Press, 2022
A Grammar of Ugaritic is an accessible yet academically rigorous textbook for first-year students of Ugaritic. Eight digestible lessons include more than 150 exercises to strengthen readers’ understanding through translation and composition of not only vocalized Ugaritic but also transcribed texts and cuneiform script—strategies that develop language skills and provide a sound basis for classroom teaching. Short stories interspersed among the lessons help students consolidate their knowledge and bolster recognition of forms. An introduction to the language and its historical context, glossaries, paradigms, and a bibliography and guide for further learning supplement the lessons. Students who work through the grammar in the classroom or individually will be rewarded with the ability to read real Ugaritic texts in cuneiform.
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Gramática para la composición
Segunda edición
M. Stanley Whitley and Luis González
Georgetown University Press, 2007

Integrating grammar and composition, this comprehensive new edition guides the advanced student through progressively more complex types of writing by organizing the grammar lessons on a functionalist basis around the needs of composition. This innovative approach to teaching Spanish grammar and composition promotes systematic language development and enables students to strengthen their expressive and editing skills in the language in order to write more effectively and more confidently. Refined by years of classroom testing and analysis of the problems students encounter, this bestselling textbook has been substantially rewritten and incorporates current research in composition, pedagogy, second-language acquisition, and linguistics. Expanded self-correcting exercises are also available online, making Gramática para la composición one of the most valuable textbooks available for advanced students of Spanish.

FEATURES: • Focuses on work in six level-appropriate types of composition: description, synopsis, personal narrative, creative narrative, exposition, and argumentation;

• Based on ACTFL guidelines for students progressing from intermediate to advanced levels of proficiency;

• Covers syntax, dictionary skills, problematic word distinctions, and rhetorical features of discourse structure;

• Contains exercises on grammar practice, working with sentences and paragraphs, guided essays, and free composition.

NEW TO THE SECOND EDITION:

• Each lesson has been clearly divided into two distinct parts: Presentación (material that students prepare before class) and Aplicación (the activities they do in class or as homework);

Prácticas individuales have been expanded and recreated as self-checking exercises that provide immediate feedback and scoring. These prácticas are available for free online at www.gramaticaparalacomposicion.com;

• Images from William Bull's Visual Grammar of Spanish help with distinctions that seem difficult;

• An Instructor's Manual—available for free online—reviews teaching and grading methodology for writing-intensive courses, offers suggestions for syllabus organization and for teaching each lesson, and provides additional exercises and activities. To download this free PDF, visit www.press.georgetown.edu;

• Free website created by authors contains self-checking exercises at www.gramaticaparalacomposicion.com.

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Gramática para la composición
tercera edición
M. Stanley Whitley y Luis González
Georgetown University Press, 2015

E-Textbooks are now available to purchase or rent through VitalSource.com! Please visit VitalSource for more information on pricing and availability.

As of January 1, 2021, Smart Sparrow Companion Websites are no longer available for any of our textbook programs. New companion websites are coming soon, and will be hosted by Lingco. Instructors may sample the new companion websites now by visiting GUPTextbooks.com/companionwebsites. The full websites will be available for fall 2021 course adoption.

Until the new companion websites become available, eBook Workbooks with exercises from the Smart Sparrow Electronic Workbook are available for purchase on the GUP website and VitalSource.com, as are Workbook Answer Keys. They will both be sold in eBook format only.

About Gramática para la composición, tercera edición

This best-selling textbook guides advanced students through progressively more complex types of writing by organizing the grammar lessons on a functionalist basis around the needs of composition. This innovative approach to teaching Spanish grammar and composition promotes systematic language development and enables students to strengthen their expressive and editing skills in the language in order to write more effectively and confidently.

Refined by years of classroom testing and analysis of the problems students encounter, Gramática para la composición features the following:

• A colorful design helps students navigate the book more easily and engage visual learning strategies• Readings for major composition exercises that stress authentic, connected discourse• A Workbook with all of the homework exercises needed for practice (sold separately)• Streamlined treatment of points of grammar, including an explanation for more than twelve functions of se with a rule of subject reflexivization

For Teachers:

Exam copies of the textbook, Workbook, and Workbook Answer Keys are available free of charge to instructors and must be requested separately. Textbook exam copies can be ordered on this page. To request digital exam copies of the Workbook and Workbook Answer Keys, please visit the pages for each of those products.

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