Basics of English Grammar (2025)

Basic Grammar

Basic English Grammar with Exercises

The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language

Journal of Pragmatics, 2009

(paperback) GBP 21.99. x + 446 pp. Also available online through Wiley InterScience subscription service This is no less than the nineteenth in the Blackwell Guides to Philosophy series. One might have expected Philosophy of Language to have appeared earlier in the series. It consists of an introduction and 20 chapters, often of about 15 pages each but sometimes more. Devitt and Hanley have assembled a genuinely distinguished set of authors. Following the introduction there are three sections: Foundational Issues, which consists of a single article by Martin Davies, followed by sections on Meaning and on Reference. This rather traditional principle of organization covers a reasonably broad range of topics. Given the importance of theories of meaning that depend on reference and truth there is considerable intermingling of content between the second and third sections. The way the series works is for authoritative authors to provide an overview of issues in the field, while not concealing their own positions. A reader of this journal who felt they wished to be exposed at a serious level to some of the main current themes in the Philosophy of Language could do well to look into this volume. There are other places to look, for example The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Language which has well over twice the number of pages and double the number of articles, some on more specialized topics. The Blackwell Guide has its place, though, being perhaps less daunting and significantly more portable. Devitt and Hanley's 16-page introduction is indeed a good place to start for a reader with, say, a linguistics training and no great acquaintance with contemporary philosophy. It takes the reader through the topics discussed in the volume and thus lays out the nature of some of the obsessions and directions of philosophers with an interest in language. Martin Davies' Chapter 1: Foundational Issues is understandably challenging, but worthy of interest from readers of this journal. It is one place where you will see a philosopher's perspective on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. But that is just one of a variety of foundational issues discussed, others being whether semantics can be a philosophical project, and the contrast between Davidson's (1984) and Grice's (1989) approaches to meaning. Chapter 2: The Nature of Meaning, by Paul Horwich, provides a kind of overview of the section on meaning. It covers: meaning scepticism, reductionism, language and thought, compositionality, normativity, externalism, deflationism, prospects for a use theory of meaning, and further problems. Looking through the authors referred to in that chapter gives you a good selection of the major players in the field. The semantics/pragmatics relationship, which was mentioned in Chapter 1, is developed more fully by Kent Bach in Chapter 8: Speech Acts and Pragmatics. The chapter covers performative utterances, the locutionary/illocutionary/ perlocutionary act distinction, kinds of illocutionary acts, Gricean reflexive communicative intentions (used to illuminate some illocutionary acts, as recommended by Strawson, 1972), conversational implicature and Bach's (1994) own notion of impliciture, conventional implicature (the notion originated in Frege, 1952!), the semantics/ pragmatics distinction, including the distinction between wide context (where there is contextual information relevant to ascertaining the speaker's intention) and narrow context (involving only information relevant to providing semantic values of context-sensitive expressions). There is also an interesting section on the significance of the semantics/pragmatics distinction. This illustrates Grice's stance against postulating unnecessary ambiguities, showing how the phenomena can be explained in terms of implicatures. It also covers how a simplistic association of meaning and use by ordinary language philosophers can lead to error, for example the move from the observation that describing something as good is typically used to express www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma

Laurie Bauer, The Linguistics Student's Handbook. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Pp. ix + 387

An Introductionto the Grammar of English

Introducing English Linguistics.Book Review

Open Access Library Journal , 2021

Every normal human being is born with a natural capacity for language learning and acquisition. To gain proficiency in language learning or teaching, one needs to fathom certain inputs that facilitate language learning and teaching. Books are influential resources for English language teaching and learning. Research papers can also be beneficial resources that facilitate second language teaching and learning. This paper, therefore, provides a précis of the main tenets of Meyer’s Introducing English Linguistics , in guileless words for the assistance of our second language students, readers, and English as second language teachers and users in general. Though this content analysis review paper uses the text, Introducing English Linguistics as the main data, references have been made to other related information from other authors.

Chapter 1 The Study of Grammar

Working with English Grammar, 2018

words' like the, he and of-linguists call these words function words-which link parts of a sentence together and which permit the expression of comprehensible utterances. For each of these groups of people, grammar raises different, but equally important, issues and concerns. Some of these uses of grammar will be addressed further throughout the book. KEY POINTS: What is grammar? • Most linguists define grammar as the study of morphology and syntax. An influential linguist called Noam Chomsky adopts a different definition of grammar. Chomsky's generative grammar contains phonology and semantics in addition to syntax.

Theory of English Grammar Synopsis

Jim Miller An Introduction to English Syntax

John Lyons, Natural language and universal grammar. Essays in linguistic theory, volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. xv + 290

Journal of Linguistics, 1992