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Grammar by Diagram, second edition is a book designed for anyone who wishes to improve grammatical understanding and skill. Using traditional sentence diagraming as a visual tool, the book explains how to expand simple sentences into compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences, and how to employ verbals (infinitives, gerunds, and participles) and other structures for additional variety. The text addresses the most frequent usage errors by explaining how to distinguish between adjectives and adverbs; how to avoid problems of pronoun case, agreement, and consistency; how to ensure that verbs will agree with their subjects and will be appropriate in terms of tense, aspect, voice, and mood; and how to phrase sentences to avoid errors in parallelism or placement of modifiers. Six appendices incorporate further exercises, a summary of key basics from the text, and supplemental material not included in the body of the text but useful for quick reference. This new edition includes additional exercises and has been revised and updated throughout.
A Reference Grammar of Dutch is aimed at English-speaking students of Dutch at beginner/intermediate level. It is designed to be practical and user-friendly: grammatical information is presented in short entries arranged in alphabetical order, allowing students to gain easy access to specific points of grammar or problematic points of vocabulary as they encounter them in practice. Each grammatical rule is illustrated by simple, everyday Dutch examples of the kind likely to be encountered and used by the learner. Specialised linguistic terminology is kept to a minimum, with a glossary of essential terms provided, and charts and tables are included to help the student focus on the main points. Each entry is linked to a set of exercises which are graded according to complexity, and there is a key to the exercises at the back of the book. A thorough index is also provided.
This book is based on the results of research in language typology, and motivated by the need for a theory to explain them. The essence of the approach is (a) that almost all aspects of grammatical structure are language specific, and (b) that language universals are to be found in conceptual structure and in the mapping of conceptual structure on to linguistic form. It proposes intimate links between syntactic and semantic structures, and argues that the basic elements of any language are not syntactic but syntactic-semantic 'Gestalts'. Professor Croft puts forward a new approach to syntactic representation and a new model of how language and languages work. He covers a wide range of syntactic phenomena, illustrating these with examples that show the varied grammatical structures of the world's languages. The book will be accessible all linguists at graduate level and beyond.
