Brian Browser's book-filled trousers

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Jun 14, 2010 5:07 am

Below are links to most of the quotes or paraphrases that (with the exception of the "Huddleston on 'remoteness'", which was posted by Woodcutter) I've made from various books over the years for the purposes of discussion here on Dave's. They might provide somewhat interesting reading for those who've not seen them before.

Algeo on the 'mandative indicative':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 928#859928

Biber et al's LGSWE on choices of personal prounoun case:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 360#881360

Biber et al's LSGSWE on relative clauses, and noun complement clauses:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=9497

Cambridge International Dictionary of English's list of Japanese "false friends":
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 731#723731

Celce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman on the function of present perfect:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 2977#12977

COBUILD on the pattern 'n ADJ':
see Huddleston & Pullum's CGEL on 'postpositive adjectives'.

COBUILD on 'Personal pronouns as demonstratives':
see Huddleston & Pullum's CGEL on 'personal determinatives'.

COBUILD on reflexive pronouns:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=9866

Dabrowska on the meaning of 'No head injury is too trivial to ignore':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=2246

Fillmore & Atkins on 'semantic frames':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=2644

Huddleston (not Lewis!) on 'remoteness':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 1111#11111

Huddleston & Pullum's CGEL on 'personal determinatives':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 1922#41922

Huddleston & Pullum's CGEL on 'postpositive adjectives':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 9454#39454

Huddleston & Pullum's CGEL on 'reversed polarity tags':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 686#636686

Hudson on universals versus language-particular constructions:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic ... 560#811560

Jarvie's "noun phrases":
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=9958

Kirkness on the most frequent way of negating 'used to':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 5372#35372

Lantolf defining 'Applied Linguistics':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 4617#14617

Mairal & Gil on linguistic universals:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 3272#43272

Matthews on connotation:
see Trask on connotation.

Matthews on 'evidentials':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 4679#14679

Pearce on 'that-clauses':
see Biber et al's LSGSWE on relative clauses, and noun complement clauses.

Sampson on 'impossible constructions':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=9936

Sampson on the innatist 'poverty of the stimulus' argument:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 7225#37225

Schmitt on vocabulary learning strategies:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 4907#24907

Stern on 'future tense':
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=4131

Taylor on modals:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 4082#44082

Trask on connotation:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=32579

Trask on dangling participles:
see Sampson on 'impossible constructions'.

Wells on Upton's changes to the pronunciation scheme used in OUP's native-speaker dictionaries:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 0224#40224

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Thu Jun 24, 2010 6:44 pm

I can't wait for the following book (Leech et al's Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study, part of CUP's Studies in English Language series*) to come out in paperback!
http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/c ... 0521867221

Also on my shopping list now is the Blackwell Handbook of English Linguistics.

Anybody else got any books they've "got their eye on"?

*The same series that the Algeo book (that I link to/refer to/quote from in the post immediately above this one) hails from!

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Jul 18, 2010 3:31 am

New: the Macmillan Collocations Dictionary!
http://www.macmillandictionaries.com/ab ... ations.htm

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Oct 09, 2010 9:57 pm

While searching for something or another, I came across an obituary (by Michael Hoey) for John Sinclair, the influential linguist who really "rebooted" corpus-based studies of English and made the University of Birmingham and the COBUILD project world-famous. I hadn't realized he'd died, nor I suspect have many people, so I thought I'd post the link as a sort of belated tribute to the man (not that I knew him, but you get the sentiment!):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/may ... obituaries

Another reason for posting this (this being the Book Browser thread after all!) is that a book mentioned in the obituary caught my eye:

Linear Unit Grammar (2006), co-authored with Anna Mauranen, revisits the idiom principle and absorbs it into an integrated theory of grammar. It is likely that this will posthumously be recognised as a further major contribution to our understanding of English.

It's previewable on Google Books, and is of particular interest (to me at least) because it apparently carries forward the work of David Brazil (whose A Grammar of Speech is mentioned in the Dedication on page vii).

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Oct 31, 2010 11:59 am

Robert McCrum's Observer interview with Nicholas Ostler (whose Empires of the Word was mentioned a few pages back) about Ostler's new book The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... right-idea

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Wed Nov 17, 2010 12:13 am

(A non-recommendation, this one!) The closing lines of Geoffrey Pullum's review (in a pdf that he links to over on Language Log) of Simon Heffer's Strictly English: The Correct Way to Write...and Why It Matters: "Peddling fictive rules is not a defence of writing standards; it is an intellectual abdication. Heffer should be ashamed of himself, and Random House should be ashamed of this book."

(Gotta also love another bit that Pullum, and a reader in response by way of comment, wrote: "I know that a few tender souls will feel that there must be something good in everything, and that I really shouldn't be so negative. So I will say one favorable thing about the book. Holding it in my hands did not make my skin erupt in a horrible disfiguring disease" - 'You just want to be quoted in their advertising').

In the Language Log piece there's also a link provided by Pullum to another review (also negative) of Heffer by David Crystal.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2780

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Dec 05, 2010 10:30 pm

There's a new book out in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series: Richard Hudson's An Introduction to Word Grammar.
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/*beep*/publications.htm

I'm currently reading through his 1998 English Grammar (from the Routledge Language Workbooks series), which has been a bit of a mixed bag so far: one minute he's scared of burdening the reader with even one easy item of terminology, yet the next he's posing, for the average reader, probably quite brain-numbing questions. Definitely one more for any undergraduate aiming to get into "linguistics proper" by means of doing dependency-grammar diagramming (and who really wants or even needs to do much of that?) than for the budding EFL teacher seeking a more straightforward grounding in relatively mainstream traditional-modern descriptive grammar, then!

By the way, at the top of the page (of this here Brian Browser thread) there's a link to a passage I quoted from Hudson's 2007 Language Networks.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Dec 18, 2010 5:42 pm

This looks like it could be a nice (i.e. relatively gentler than Van Valin etc) introduction to language analysis in the RRG (Role and Reference Grammar) mould: http://www.cambridge.org/gb/knowledge/i ... cale=en_GB
(The Structure of Language: An Introduction to Grammatical Analysis, by Emma L Pavey. CUP 2010)

The book that I'm really really waiting for however is the ABC English-Chinese, Chinese-English Dictionary from the University of Hawaii Press (there's been a considerable delay in Amazon stocking this, for some strange reason!).

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Mon Jan 24, 2011 4:44 am

Spotted this relatively recent offering from Guy Deutscher:
http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language- ... _pr_sims_t

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Tue Jun 07, 2011 5:27 pm

Routledge has released a Handbook of Applied Linguistics (in its, er, Handbooks in Applied Linguistics range):
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Routledge-Handb ... 0415490677

Some of the contributors are the same/contributing roughly the same topics as in the Blackwell Handbook of AL (eds Davies & Elder), but some are more definitely associated with ELT, which could be good, e.g. Swan, Thornbury, Larsen-Freeman.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Oct 08, 2011 1:34 pm

New in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series is Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice by Tony McEnery & Andrew Hardie. It's previewable on Google Books, as well as (in the hardcover version) on Amazon UK.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Oct 16, 2011 4:01 pm

Pinker's latest book (about the decline of violence), the Guardian article on which includes an interview with the author:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/ ... -interview

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 11:53 pm

Interview with Daniel Everett, who has a new book out, Language: The Cultural Tool:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/20 ... age-piraha

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Fri Dec 27, 2013 12:59 pm

There's a new edition out of that ol' fave of mine, the Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar, BUT the new additional author (Bas Aarts), presumably called in to do his worst, has seen fit to remove the phonetics entries*, and in their place add doubtless a fair amount of syntactic stodge from the CamGEL and other modern-theoretical linguistics. Way to make a great book a lot less useful, Oxford! The late Sylvia Chalker may be less than pleased. I know I am!

Why oh why didn't they get him to mess up Matthews' Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics instead?!

http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Englis ... 199658234/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dictionary-Engl ... 199658234/
(Available now in the UK, but not quite yet in the US)

What I might do in the new year, if I have time, is type up the phonetics entries from the Chalker & Weiner edition and post them somewhere on Dave's, so that anyone who buys the new Aarts edition won't be missing out on useful info. In the meantime, there's always Peter Roach's A Little Encyclopaedia of Phonetics/English Phonetics and Phonology Glossary:
http://www.cambridge.org/servlet/file/E ... ID=2491706

*"Readers familiar with the first edition will notice that the entries on English phonetics have been removed. The reason for this is that it is very unusual for phonetics to be covered under the heading of 'grammar', and this terminology is best dealt with elsewhere."

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Wed Jan 01, 2014 1:29 am

Noticed this messy sprawl of an article in the Guardian today (why do I get the feeling that e.g. Honey's Language is Power is a more informative read, especially regarding the shaping role of linguistics on language-educational debate, even though it comes to the opposite conclusion: that a standard has its uses, which should be taken advantage of):
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/d ... cs-chomsky

The writer, Harry Ritchie, has a book out (ah, that'd be why!), English for the Natives: Discover the Grammar You Don't Know You Know:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews ... ewpoints=1

Trade review: 'A deft and highly entertaining guide to English grammar from the author of "The Last Pink Bits", "Friday Night Club" and "The Third Party". Taking a unique approach to grammar, this outlines the rules and structures of our language as they are taught to foreign students - and have never before been explained to us.'

The Amazon reviews are interesting, bit of a mixed bag but the following caught my eye:

"The rest of the book, 9 out of 11 chapters, is an excellent English grammar, but not for native-speakers. As the book's own sub-title says, it's the grammar that English-speakers already know, but don't know they know. They don't need to be taught it, either at school or in Mr Ritchie's book, however interesting it may be for geeks like me to have it all set out in print. For foreigners, on the other hand, this could be a superb English primer."