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Testing Your Grammar provides the most comprehensive review of the grammatical structures of English and is excellent practice for students taking English language proficiency exams. Testing Your Grammar covers all of the major aspects of English grammar -- count and non-count nouns, agreements, verb tense, modals, comparisons, complex cause structures -- that ESL students need to manage in order to improve their English.

With all units enlarged or significantly modified, the new and improved edition of Testing Your Grammar features reworked grammatical explanations and more example sentences so grammar points are easier to understand. Other features of the new edition:

The aim of this book is to enable the student to read, write, and speak acceptable Israeli Hebrew and to understand less complex biblical Hebrew. A unique feature is the author's use of the principles of structural analysis. For students who are not acquainted with a language other than English, he elucidates those features of the language that are unfamiliar in the structure of English. The student is trained, from the first, to read "unvocalized" script as the native reader does, and "reading clues" (word and phrase patterns) are provided for this purpose.

The work is organized into sections that can be worked through in an academic year—presentation of features, text samples, exercises, grammatical synopses, and individual and comprehensive glossaries. This text may be used by teachers without specialized training in linguistics. It can be used by self-teaching students as well as by those at college level, and it will valuable for immigrants to Israel.

In this important new study, Sandro Sessarego provides a syntactic description of the Afro-Bolivian Spanish determiner phrase. Afro-Bolivian Spanish is one of the many Afro-Hispanic dialects spoken across Latin America and, from a theoretical point of view, is rich in constructions that would be considered ungrammatical in standard Spanish. Yet these constructions form the core grammar of these less-prestigious, but equally efficient, syntactic systems. Because of the wide variety of their usages, Sessarego’s study of these contact varieties is particularly valuable in developing and refining theories of syntactic microvariation.
 
This dialect presents phenomena that offer a real challenge to current linguistic theory. The Afro-Bolivian Spanish Determiner Phrase elaborates on the importance of enhancing a stronger dialogue between formal generative theory and sociolinguistic methodology, in line with recent work in the field of minimalist syntax. Sessarego’s study combines sociolinguistic techniques of data collection with generative models of data analysis to obtain more fine-grained, empirically testable generalizations.

Of Angie Estes, the poet and critic Stephanie Burt has written that she “has created some of the most beautiful verbal objects in the world.” In The Allure of Grammar, Doug Rutledge gathers insightful responses to the full range of Estes’s work—from a review of her first chapbook to a reading of a poem appearing in her 2018 book, Parole—that approach these beautiful verbal objects with both intellectual rigor and genuine awe.

In addition to presenting an overview of critical reactions to Estes’s oeuvre, reviews by Langdon Hammer, Julianne Buchsbaum, and Christopher Spaide also provide a helpful context for approaching a poet who claims to distrust narrative. Original essays consider the craft of Estes’s poetry and offer literary analysis. Ahren Warner uses line breaks to explore a postmodern analysis of Estes’s work. Mark Irwin looks at her poetic structure. Lee Upton employs a feminist perspective to explore Estes’s use of italics, and B. K. Fischer looks at the way she uses dance as a poetic image. Doug Rutledge considers her relationship to Dante and to the literary tradition through her use of ekphrasis. An interview with Estes herself, in which she speaks of a poem as an “arranged place . . . where experience happens,” adds her perspective to the mix, at turns resonating with and challenging her critics.

The Allure of Grammar will be useful for teachers and students of creative writing interested in the craft of non-narrative poetry. Readers of contemporary poetry who already admire Estes will find this collection insightful, while those not yet familiar with her work will come away from these essays eager to seek out her books.

The Arapaho Language is the definitive reference grammar of an endangered Algonquian language. Arapaho differs strikingly from other Algonquian languages, making it particularly relevant to the study of historical linguistics and the evolution of grammar. Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss Sr. document Arapaho's interesting features, including a pitch-based accent system with no exact Algonquian parallels, radical innovations in the verb system, and complex contrasts between affirmative and non-affirmative statements.

Cowell and Moss detail strategies used by speakers of this highly polysynthetic language to form complex words and illustrate how word formation interacts with information structure. They discuss word order and discourse-level features, treat the special features of formal discourse style and traditional narratives, and list gender-specific particles, which are widely used in conversation. Appendices include full sets of inflections for a variety of verbs.

Arapaho is spoken primarily in Wyoming, with a few speakers in Oklahoma. The corpus used in The Arapaho Language spans more than a century of documentation, including multiple speakers from Wyoming and Oklahoma, with emphasis on recent recordings from Wyoming. The book cites approximately 2,000 language examples drawn largely from natural discourse - either recorded spoken language or texts written by native speakers.

With The Arapaho Language, Cowell and Moss have produced a comprehensive document of a language that, in its departures from its nearest linguistic neighbors, sheds light on the evolution of grammar.

Since its first publication in 1994, Alan R. King’s introduction to the Basque language has become the standard textbook for classroom language students and individuals learning this unique language on their own. It offers clear explanations of grammatical structure, exercises that allow students to practice grammatical and communication skills, dialogues and narrative texts that provide a glimpse into Basque social and family life. It also provides exercises in pronunciation and tips for instructors and students to help them achieve fluency in modern Basque.

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.

Joan Bybee and her colleagues present a new theory of the evolution of grammar that links structure and meaning in a way that directly challenges most contemporary versions of generative grammar. This study focuses on the use and meaning of grammatical markers of tense, aspect, and modality and identifies a universal set of grammatical categories. The authors demonstrate that the semantic content of these categories evolves gradually and that this process of evolution is strikingly similar across unrelated languages.

Through a survey of seventy-six languages in twenty-five different phyla, the authors show that the same paths of change occur universally and that movement along these paths is in one direction only. This analysis reveals that lexical substance evolves into grammatical substance through various mechanisms of change, such as metaphorical extension and the conventionalization of implicature. Grammaticization is always accompanied by an increase in frequency of the grammatical marker, providing clear evidence that language use is a major factor in the evolution of synchronic language states.

The Evolution of Grammar has important implications for the development of language and for the study of cognitive processes in general.

This study grew out of a series of lectures Jespersen gave at Columbia
University in 1909-10, called “An Introduction to English Grammar.”
It is the connected presentation of Jespersen's views of the general
principles of grammar based on years of studying various languages
through both direct observation of living speech and written and
printed documents.

“[The Philosophy of Grammar and Analytic Syntax] set
forth the most extensive and original theory of universal grammar
prior to the work of Chomsky and other generative grammarians of the
last thirty years.”—Arne Juul and Hans F. Nielsen, in Otto
Jespersen: Facets of His Life and Work

“Besides being one of the most perceptive observers and original
thinkers that the field of linguistics has ever known, Jespersen was
also one of its most entertaining writers, and reading The
Philosophy of Grammar is fun. Read it, enjoy it.”—James D.
McCawley, from the Introduction

Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), an authority on the growth and structure
of language, was the Chair of the English Department at the University
of Copenhagen. Among his many works are A Modern English
Grammar and Analytic Syntax, the latter published by the
University of Chicago Press.

During the last thirty years, most linguists and philosophers have assumed that meaning can be represented symbolically and that the mental processing of language involves the manipulation of symbols. Scholars have assembled strong evidence that there must be linguistic representations at several abstract levels—phonological, syntactic, and semantic—and that those representations are related by a describable system of rules. Because meaning is so complex, linguists often posit an equally complex relationship between semantic and other levels of grammar.

The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.

Covering the spectrum of grammatical structures, The Structure of English teaches why grammatical structures are important and how to use them through literary illustrations and clear explanations of grammar's effective use and communicative function. It is directed at future English teachers, as well as the new ESL/EFL teacher.

With an emphasis on discourse function throughout, students are never expected to rely on lists of unrelated, constructed example sentences. Rather, when major points of grammar are presented, the structures are illustrated with rich, "real world" contexts excerpted from literature (mostly American), including novels, short stories, poems, essays, and drama. Exercises in the companion workbook are likewise based on naturally occurring stretches of discourse.

Though informed by modern linguistic theory, explanations are framed in more traditional terminology and are designed to help build students' confidence in using English grammar by deepening their understanding of its forms and functions..

For advanced ESL students and graduate TESOL and certificate programs.

The study of Bantu languages of sub-Saharan Africa has provided the basis for significant contributions to research in linguistics. In recent years they have been used to advance morphological as well as syntactic theory, and in the study of interface relations in grammatical theory. The papers assembled in this volume, contributed by leading scholars in Bantu and general linguistics, deal with various aspects of the structure of Bantu languages.

The first book of Thucydides is a compact masterpiece. Here he sets up the conditions that led to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 B.C. With great economy, he analyzes the origins of large-scale wars; integrates a sketch of the historical background into the larger thematic threads of his narrative; presents a brief statement of his methods and goals; outlines a hierarchy of causation; develops a theory of character and human nature; and presents a theory of leadership, chance, and foresight, all within a narrative structure that perfectly focuses these elements.
Because Book I is not primarily historical narrative, it inevitably proves difficult for inexperienced readers. Despite the convolutions and density of Thucydides' prose style, no authoritative commentary has been published since the early days of the last century. H. D. Cameron is a renowned expert in Greek and comparative grammar and has written this handbook for all levels of classical students and scholars. His commentary authoritatively accounts for the last one hundred years of evolving grammatical and linguistic theory as they apply to the seminal work of Thucydides.
H. D. Cameron is Professor of Greek and Latin and Director of the Great Books Program at the University of Michigan.

Only recently discovered by linguistic scholars, Tondi Songway Kiini (TSK) is a tonal language spoken in the small country of Mali in western Africa. Unlike other Songhay languages, TSK preserves the lexical and grammatical tones of its proto-language and also exhibits unique systems for the expression of focalization and relativization. Tondi Songway Kiini is a valuable overview of the grammar of an African language with a tone system quite different from that of the more familiar Bantu system. It is also an irreplaceable guide to the grammar and meanings of this unusual African language.