Comprehensive Grammar Research Articles

Rules of Islamic creed ''Aqidah'' Between Theory and Practical (A Study of creed Issues According to Ash'arites)

The attention to the deductive method began with Imam Al-Ash’ari and the establishment of the rules of theorizing from the first moment of the emergence of the Ash’ari school of thought at the hands of the founder of the school of thought, Abu Al-Hasan Al-Ash’ari, and the scholars who followed after him who wrote theological works. This reflects the great care of the Ash’arism in rooting and theorizing the methods of theory, and setting the methodological rules of reasoning, so he dealt with The research examines the most important comprehensive theological rules through which the Ash’ari reasoned in the doctrinal issues on which Ash’ari theological thought was founded, taking into account the extent of stability or change that occurred in some of these rules along the path of the Ash’ari doctrine. The aim of this study was to answer an important methodological question in formulating the verbal thinking curriculum: It is: What is the impact of comprehensive verbal rules in achieving intellectual consistency and methodological consistency in the theory of verbal reasoning according to the Ash’arism between theory and application? The answer to the nature of this research required delving into the journey of exploring the idea of comprehensive verbal grammar in the theological heritage. It was appropriate for this task to adopt the historical approach in collecting the material and searching for comprehensive grammar in its context from the verbal works approved in the Ash’arite school. It was necessary to study the origins of the theory of verbal grammar. Comprehensive and anticipating the methodological features governing inference, adopting the analytical approach; The approach adopted in this study was a combined approach of the two approaches: historical and analytical, in order to reach the impact of comprehensive verbal rules in both theoretical and applied studies.

Toward a Grammar of Danish Talk-in-Interaction: From Action Formation to Grammatical Description

ABSTRACT Is it possible to develop a comprehensive grammar of talk-in-interaction for a specific language based on descriptions of social actions? This is the question we will try to answer in this article. The article is based on the work of the project The Grammar in Everyday Life, which aims to build a systematic grammatical description of Danish talk-in-interaction based on descriptions of social action formats within three domains: question–answer sequences, commissive–directive sequences, and the negotiation of participation during longer spates of talk. Our ambition is to build a grammar that takes into consideration how talk is used in the real-time unfolding of interaction to do actions and to negotiate relationships. Through a presentation of three formats, we discuss how a grammatical description can be organized, how granular it should be, if and how traditional grammatical categories can be used, and how prosodic and embodied features could be included. Data are in Danish.

Some Aspects of Ergativity in English and Arabic

The present study is a contrastive analysis of the notion of Ergativity in English1 and Arabic2. It attempts to discuss this phenomenon to find out the points of similarity and difference between the two languages in this particular linguistic area. It offers an explanation and a detailed description of the term and illustrates the various types and forms of verbs that can be handled under the headings ergative verbs and non-ergative verbs showing how the former differ from the latter. Additionally, it investigates the verbs which are used both transitively and intransitively in the two languages. All these types of verbs will be identified, classified, and analyzed according to the Quirk grammar - the approach to grammatical description pioneered by Randolph Quirk and his associates, and published in a series of reference grammars during the 1970s and 1980s, notably A Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) and its successor A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language in1985. Reference, will, however, be made, wherever necessary, to the principles, techniques and terminology of other models of grammar. The method is, thus, more or less, eclectic. As far as ergativity in Arabic is concerned, the study adopts the model of grammatical description and classification pioneered by traditional Arab grammarians such as Siibawayhi, Ibn ‘Aqiil, and Mubarrid, and by modern Arab grammarians like Ghalaayiinii, ‘Udhaymah, and ‘Abbaas Hasan, among others. The conclusion part offers the main findings of the study.

On how Compositional Aspect and the Article-Aspect Interplay Ought to Appear in English Comprehensive Grammars

Two recent publications on compositional aspect (CA) and the article-aspect interplay (AAI) in English argue that these cross-language phenomena are so fundamental that they must be taught to learners of English at higher levels and incorporated into the contents of comprehensive English grammars (CEGs). This paper fully endorses the idea that English language teaching (ELT) at higher levels – intermediate to advanced, must include CA-AAI and that CA-AAI must also become part of the lingusitic knowledge of native speakers, but focuses on some aspects of the CA theory that are insufficiently covered and need further elaboration. Outlined and analyzed are some CA theory issues that must be appropriately handled in CEGs – and in intermediate/advanced ELT in general. It is high time for the domains of aspect, tense, nominal determination, lexical semantics and aspectually relevant adverbials to be describеd in CEGs in terms of CA and according to the latest achievements of theoretical linguistics. This will provide a much better picture of the structure, rules and regularities of the world’s most important language today. Keywords: Compositional and verbal aspect, article-aspect interplay, perfectivity- imperfectivity, boundedness/non-boundedness, definite/indefinite/zero article

The Use of the Word "Get" In English

This paper discussed variations of the use of the word “get” in the novels A Building on Life Broken Piece by Dandie, A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mason and The Big Bad Wolf by Patterson. The analysis was done according to the theories applied. The main theory used in this paper was the theory of Quirk in the book entitled A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985). The second book which was used as supporting theory was the theory of Swan from the book entitled Practical English Usage. There were kinds of method which was used in this paper involved data source, data collection, and data analysis. Based on the result of the analysis, there were some kinds and forms of the use of the word get in English and it has a different meaning. The kinds of the use of the word get in English and their meaning are: 1) get combined with adjective and has a meaning: “become” and “suffer”. 2) get combined with past participle and has a meaning to make somebody/something or yourself to reach a particular situation, state or condition. 3) get combined with noun/pronoun and has a meaning “bring, receive, and catch/ hit. 4) get combined with a description of the place/time and has meaning “arrive. 5) get combined with an object and has a meaning understand. 6) get combined with adverb or particle preposition and has a meaning refers to a movement, involved, return, to tell somebody move or stop touching.
 Keywords: the use of word, get, syntax, phrasal verb

Enhanced Electronic Grammars Online

Enhanced Electronic Grammars Online (EEG) is a full-text linguistics database available on the De Gruyter platform. EEG offers the ability to conduct searches across dozens of comprehensive grammars describing rare and endangered world languages. Intended for use by researchers into general linguistics and linguistic typology, EEG would also be a good resource for undergraduate teaching. The review notes some issues with the search interface and metadata.

Thinking for speaking in the right aspect

Abstract In this article we focus on the category of aspect and examine modern English grammars to see whether they give sufficient guidelines to the learner on how aspectual meanings are decoded and encoded in English. More precisely, we check whether the grammars reflect the abundant linguistic research on aspectual construal in English. Out of a number of components that play a role in the shaping of aspectual meaning, we look at the following four: lexical aspect, arguments, grammatical aspect, and tense. An overview is first made of the key theoretical findings on the impact of these four components on aspectual interpretation, followed by an analysis of the grammar content on the given components. Our conclusion is that only two comprehensive grammars we examined take into account the results of linguistic research on aspect to a certain extent and that there is a lot of room for improvement.

Cameroon Pidgin English: A comprehensive grammar by Miriam Ayafor and Melanie J. Green

Reviewed by: Cameroon Pidgin English: A comprehensive grammar by Miriam Ayafor and Melanie J. Green Kofi Yakpo Cameroon Pidgin English: A comprehensive grammar. By Miriam Ayafor and Melanie J. Green. (London Oriental and African language library 20.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. xxi, 314. ISBN 9789027262400. $54. Cameroon Pidgin English, by Miriam Ayafor and Melanie Green, is the latest and, as the subtitle 'A comprehensive grammar' suggests, most extensive work yet on the African English-lexifier creole language Cameroon Pidgin English (CPE). CPE is the second-largest English-lexifier contact language in the world after Nigerian Pidgin, and it belongs to a chain of closely related, mutually intelligible varieties spoken in the West African littoral zone in The Gambia (Aku), Sierra Leone (Krio), Ghana (Ghanaian Pidgin English), Equatorial Guinea (Pichi), and Nigeria (Nigerian Pidgin, also referred to as Naijá). Both authors are well placed for the task of describing CPE. A, a native speaker of CPE, has done significant work on the language (e.g. Ayafor 2008), and G is an Africanist linguist who has conducted work on Hausa (e.g. Green 1997). The linguistic examples and texts in the grammar are almost without exception extracted from a 240,000-word corpus compiled by the authors themselves, which is, to my knowledge, the largest publicly accessible corpus of any African English-lexifier contact language so far (Green, Ayafor, & Ozón 2016). Two introductory chapters provide a state of the art and a typological and sociohistorical overview of the language. Subsequent chapters cover phonetics, phonology, and orthography (Ch. 3), the lexicon (Ch. 4), the noun phrase and pronouns (Chs. 3–6), and tense, mood, modality, aspect, and negation (Ch. 7). An overview of basic clause types (Ch. 8) is followed by a description of more complex structures, including serial verb and light verb constructions (Ch. 9) and combined clauses (Ch. 10). A final chapter (Ch. 11) deals with aspects of information structure, including topic and focus. Cameroon Pidgin English covers all of the central aspects of the language, including in-depth treatments of topics that have occupied creolists for decades, like serial verb constructions and tense and aspect. There are some aspects, however, that could have been addressed differently, and I focus here on three of these, namely the orthography, the treatment of tone, and glossing. The often contentious nature of the graphization of oral languages has received some attention in the literature, including the specific case of creoles (see Deuber & Hinrichs 2007). CPE is no exception in this regard. Suggestions for the orthographic standardization of CPE have alternated between more etymological (hence English-oriented) and more phonemic systems (see Sala 2009 for an overview). As in other cases, the wide range of opinions within a small group of experts and the general absence of polity-driven codification are therefore at least partly responsible for the absence of a widely accepted orthography of CPE. The orthography used in this book therefore represents one of various individual graphization initiatives (see Ayafor 1996 for a precursor). The authors state their wish to adopt a transcription system that is 'as accessible as possible to CPE speakers' (43). This is, however, contradicted by the opaque nature of some of the graphization choices made. Although the authors' system employs distinctions in line with earlier phonemic approaches to graphization (e.g. de Féral 1989), it also introduces some idiosyncratic distinctions (e.g. dey /dè/ '3sg.sbj' vs. de /dé/ 'day' vs. deiy /dé/ 'locative copula; there' and wey /wé/ 'way' vs. weiy /wé/ 'relativizer'). In other instances, the system is (partly) etymological in relying on standard English orthographic principles for representing the distinction between the high /o/ (e.g. gote /gót/ 'goat', stone /stón/ 'stone') and the low /ɔ/ (e.g. jos // 'just'). This, in turn, leads to inconsistencies between monosyllabic words, such as noe /nó/ 'negator' and foe /fó/ 'associative preposition', and polysyllabic words containing the same vowel where the spelling is phonemic, such as folo /fólò/ 'accompany' (which should be foeloe, if consistent) or kola /kólà/ 'kola nut' (which should be koela). Further complications are introduced by the use of graphemic [End Page 562] distinctions where...

The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North by Ruth H. Sanders

 Reviews e Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North. By R H. S. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Ruth H. Sanders is Professor Emerita of German Studies at Miami University, Ohio, where her recent outputs have focused on the popularization of language-learning, and language history. Her latest book takes a similarly didactic approach to the family history of German’s northern neighbours, the languages of Scandinavia. e history and structure of the Scandinavian languages have not wanted for academic coverage over the years. Weighty tomes such as Einar Haugen’s seminal  text e Scandinavian Languages (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press) and Oskar Bandle et al.’s edited volumes, e Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages,  vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, , ), provide detailed coverage of diachronic and genetic developments in the fields of morphology, syntax, and phonology. Yet these are highly specialized works, which for all their academic rigour have limited general appeal. ere is also a wealth of reference material covering almost every eventuality of grammar and usage, from the everyday to the obscure, such as the , third edition of Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe’s Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar (London: Routledge; st edn ). But this too is lacking, for obvious reasons, in the kind of historical and cultural context that might help the wider public to understand how the given languages have developed their current shapes and interrelationships. For readers with a working knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, there are numerous volumes which, collectively at least, provide answers to these questions. For those limited to English, however, there is a glaring gap in the market for an easily accessible overview. At the time of writing, Lars Vikør’s e Nordic Languages: eir Status and Interrelations (Oslo: Novus, ) comes closest, but with almost twenty years having passed since the release of its third and most recent edition, the time is right for an update. At first glance, the volume under review looks like a promising candidate. Sanders’s stated aim is to narrate, ‘primarily for the non-specialist reader, highlights of the shared history from the earliest times’ of the languages of Scandinavia (p. ). Her narrative is openly pitched at the preconceptions and perceptions of a North American audience, but with an appeal broadened by the liberal use of emotive and engaging metaphors and Romantic imagery. Continuing in this cautiously populist furrow, she further limits the focus to ‘crucial intersections, sometimes amounting rather to collisions’ (p. ) between the seven languages of her study. is is a wise move, which frees her from any implied obligation to replicate the structures of more technical, field-specific works. Indeed, Sanders is careful to explain that there is to be no ‘comprehensive, or even chronological account, or typology of each language’ (p. ). It is also reasonable enough, in such a short volume, to avoid treatment of national literatures, which would realistically demand dozens of additional pages. Somewhat less encouragingly, the paring back does not stop there. By MLR, .,   limiting coverage of relevant historical events to ‘brief sketches’ and by deferring responsibility for ‘informative, up-to-date, and expert discussion of [. . .] further aspects of language [to] other specialized books’ (p. ), she may leave the reader wondering what, exactly, she does intend to address. e answer is a surprisingly broad sweep of contextualizing episodes for linguistic development in ‘Scandinavia’, from the prehistoric environment of the North in Chapter , via the Black Death in Chapter , through the Sámi people and language in Chapter , to the obligatory consideration of the continued existence of the languages of Scandinavia in the Epilogue. With only  pages devoted to the main body of text, not all of these issues have been explored in the same detail. e present reviewer would like to have read more about the transformative impact of Old Norse on Old English, for example, to have more than three short sentences on the linguistic consequences of the extended period of Danish influence on Norwegian referred to disparagingly by Norwegian historians as the ‘-Year Night’, or the single page devoted to the long-term challenges facing the languages of Scandinavia today...

The Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North. By Ruth H. Sanders. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2017. 211 pp. £23.40. ISBN 978-0-226-49389-3

 Reviews e Languages of Scandinavia: Seven Sisters of the North. By R H. S. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. .  pp. £.. ISBN ––––. Ruth H. Sanders is Professor Emerita of German Studies at Miami University, Ohio, where her recent outputs have focused on the popularization of language-learning, and language history. Her latest book takes a similarly didactic approach to the family history of German’s northern neighbours, the languages of Scandinavia. e history and structure of the Scandinavian languages have not wanted for academic coverage over the years. Weighty tomes such as Einar Haugen’s seminal  text e Scandinavian Languages (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press) and Oskar Bandle et al.’s edited volumes, e Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages,  vols (Berlin: de Gruyter, , ), provide detailed coverage of diachronic and genetic developments in the fields of morphology, syntax, and phonology. Yet these are highly specialized works, which for all their academic rigour have limited general appeal. ere is also a wealth of reference material covering almost every eventuality of grammar and usage, from the everyday to the obscure, such as the , third edition of Philip Holmes and Ian Hinchliffe’s Swedish: A Comprehensive Grammar (London: Routledge; st edn ). But this too is lacking, for obvious reasons, in the kind of historical and cultural context that might help the wider public to understand how the given languages have developed their current shapes and interrelationships. For readers with a working knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, there are numerous volumes which, collectively at least, provide answers to these questions. For those limited to English, however, there is a glaring gap in the market for an easily accessible overview. At the time of writing, Lars Vikør’s e Nordic Languages: eir Status and Interrelations (Oslo: Novus, ) comes closest, but with almost twenty years having passed since the release of its third and most recent edition, the time is right for an update. At first glance, the volume under review looks like a promising candidate. Sanders’s stated aim is to narrate, ‘primarily for the non-specialist reader, highlights of the shared history from the earliest times’ of the languages of Scandinavia (p. ). Her narrative is openly pitched at the preconceptions and perceptions of a North American audience, but with an appeal broadened by the liberal use of emotive and engaging metaphors and Romantic imagery. Continuing in this cautiously populist furrow, she further limits the focus to ‘crucial intersections, sometimes amounting rather to collisions’ (p. ) between the seven languages of her study. is is a wise move, which frees her from any implied obligation to replicate the structures of more technical, field-specific works. Indeed, Sanders is careful to explain that there is to be no ‘comprehensive, or even chronological account, or typology of each language’ (p. ). It is also reasonable enough, in such a short volume, to avoid treatment of national literatures, which would realistically demand dozens of additional pages. Somewhat less encouragingly, the paring back does not stop there. By MLR, .,   limiting coverage of relevant historical events to ‘brief sketches’ and by deferring responsibility for ‘informative, up-to-date, and expert discussion of [. . .] further aspects of language [to] other specialized books’ (p. ), she may leave the reader wondering what, exactly, she does intend to address. e answer is a surprisingly broad sweep of contextualizing episodes for linguistic development in ‘Scandinavia’, from the prehistoric environment of the North in Chapter , via the Black Death in Chapter , through the Sámi people and language in Chapter , to the obligatory consideration of the continued existence of the languages of Scandinavia in the Epilogue. With only  pages devoted to the main body of text, not all of these issues have been explored in the same detail. e present reviewer would like to have read more about the transformative impact of Old Norse on Old English, for example, to have more than three short sentences on the linguistic consequences of the extended period of Danish influence on Norwegian referred to disparagingly by Norwegian historians as the ‘-Year Night’, or the single page devoted to the long-term challenges facing the languages of Scandinavia today...

Types of Yes – No Questions Found in the Movie 500 Days of Summer

Abstract
 The paper entitled “Types of Yes-No Question Found in the movie “500 Days of Summer” focuses on types of the English interrogative sentences especially yes-no question forms and their functions used in the movie 500 Days of Summer in 2009. The data were analyzed qualitatively in accordance with some relative theories. The theories used for this study are the theories of English yes-no questions taken from “Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language” by Quirk (1985) and “A Practical English Grammar” by Thomson A.J and A.V Martinet (1986). Then the data were presented descriptively by explaning the process and the result of discussion.Based on the findings there are five forms of English yes-no questions found in the data belonging to the Major classes of questions. Those English yes-no questions found in the data were possitive yes-no questions, negative yes-no questions, declarative questions, tag questions, yes-no questions with modal auxiliaries. The data were analyzed and some functions of the interrogative sentence were found: (a) Asking for request;(b) Confirmation; (c) Offering; (d) Asking for information; (f) Asking for permission .Mostly yes-no questions found in the data are asking for information and confirmation. However, suggestion and greeting do not exist in the data.

On morphological borrowing

AbstractFor virtually as long as linguists have studied contact‐induced grammatical change, the borrowing of morphological formatives and patterns has been considered a relatively infrequent phenomenon—a view which is reflected in all well‐known borrowability scales. Yet all those scales have been constructed from limited data sets, thus producing rather intuitive generalizations, for example, that inflection is more resistant to borrowing than derivation. In reality, we do not have a precise idea of the global extent of the phenomenon. In particular, the borrowing of compounding techniques is a virtually uninvestigated topic. In recent years, linguists have more intensively pursued a line of research that identifies in the study of contact‐induced change a source of evidence for the theory of grammar and aims to show that different degrees of borrowability reflect fine‐grained distinctions between subcomponents of morphology. The ever‐growing availability of comprehensive grammars and detailed case studies has supplied an adequate empirical basis to reach this goal.

Morphosyntactic Analysis on English Inflectional Affixes with Special Reference to The Jakarta Post

This study is entitled Morphosyntactic Analysis on English Inflectional Affixes with Special Reference to The Jakarta Post. It is aimed at finding out the types of inflectional affixes and explaining how the inflected words found in The Jakarta Post are represented in tree diagram. The data of this study were taken from 31 articles related to business in The Jakarta Post printed edition published on 14th, 15th, and 16th of June 2017. Observation method was applied in this study for collecting data. Firstly, Articles about business were chosen. Secondly, the articles were read intensively one by one in order to find out the affixes occurring on the articles. Thirdly, every affix was marked and noted down. Lastly, those affixes were classified into inflectional affixes. The data were analyzed descriptively based on the theories of inflectional affixes proposed by Francis Katamba (1993) in his book entitled Morphology as the main theory and the theory of tree diagram by Quirk at al. (1985) in his book entitled A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language presented as supporting theory. Based on the analysis, suffixes found in the articles are the suffix –s in noun, the suffix –s in verb, the suffix –ed, the suffix –ing, the suffix –er, and the suffix –est.The suffix –s in noun and suffix –ed are the most frequent types that appearing in the data. The finding also shows that there are five syntactic functions found in the data; they are subject, predicate, object, complement, and adverbial. The inflected word as predicate appears more frequently than the other syntactic functions.

KEMAMPUAN MAHASISWA DALAM MEMAHAMI BACAAN PADA BUKU TEKS MATEMATIKA BERBAHASA INGGRIS

English Mathematics course mostly deals with comprehension questions, grammar and vocabulary related to the field of Mathematics. The goal is that students have the confidence in communicating using English as well as utilize various sources of English teaching materials. But in reality, they usually experience several problems as the medium of instruction changes from their mother tongue to another language. This phenomenon in the case of Mathematics education brings the consequences faced by Mathematics educators. This paper describes the understanding of Mathematicsematical concepts in English textbooks (Fraction) on the students of English Mathematics Study Course of Mathematics Education of Madura University. The data that used in this research is the result of the translation scripts of students at the Mathematics education department on the fractional concepts in English textbooks, observations on the student presentation and interviews. The result of this research are, Subjects still have not been able to understand the meaning of fractions that are linked in real objects and clear Mathematicsematical models., subjects still used word-for-word translation, translating without providing meaningful information and also lack of vocabulary.

THE FUNCTION OF ALBANIAN AND ENGLISH SENTENCE

A simple sentence consists of a single independent clause. A multiple sentence contains one or more clauses as its immediate constituents. Multiple sentences are either compound or complex. In a compound sentence the immediate constituents are two or more coordinate clause. In a complex sentence one or more of its elements, such as direct object or adverbial, are realized by a subordinate. [1] Simple sentence may be divided into four major syntactic classes, whose use correlates with different communicative functions; [2] we have in Albanian and English same structure of forms e.g. The sentence that has the subject and is always present and usually precedes the verb and it is positive sentence: The teacher will speak to the dean today. Mesuesi do te flet me dekanin sot. The question sentence forms have three or more models of making and noun is the kernel e.g. Will teacher speak to the dean today? Keywords: simple, compound, complex and compound complex, sentence, Albanian, English [1] Randolph Quirk (…). (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language . London, p. 719. [2] Randalph Quirk. (1973). A university grammar of English . London, p. 191. Article visualizations:

A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof

Reviewed by: A Grammar of Mandarin by Jeroen Wiedenhof Hilary M. Chappell A Grammar of Mandarin. By Jeroen Wiedenhof. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. xxv, 477. ISBN 9789027212276. USD $158.00. (HB) This grammar represents a consummate work by Jeroen Wiedenhof (JW), a scholar who has devoted much of his research career to the study of the Beijing variety of Mandarin Chinese, his familiarity and ease with the subject shining through the pages of his detailed description. Composed of twelve chapters with an enormous tally of useful tables and figures (over 70 in fact), glossaries of terminology and appendices for the different transcription systems of Mandarin and its syllable inventory, this grammar should prove to be invaluable to linguists, sinologists and students alike. One of the many pluses of this book is its use of authentic data from a corpus of colloquial Beijing Mandarin transcriptions, for which the author (JW) does not fail to indicate the precise usage and pronunciation. This is information largely lacking in grammars to date which tend to present the standard or official pronunciation, and typically only in the form of the pīnyīn transcription, adopted by China in 1958. As the author states in his preface, the focus of his grammar is on actual language use, embracing the two perspectives of language variation and change. To this end, JW not only makes comparisons between contemporary Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin speech usage, but also with the description of spoken Mandarin in Chao Yuen Ren's classic grammar, published 50 years ago, in order to identify diachronic changes that may have occurred. As a consequence of adopting this unswervingly empirical approach, many interesting theoretical considerations are raised in the [End Page 212] course of the twelve chapters that have not necessarily been tackled in other grammars such as Li and Thompson (1981) or Huang et al (2009), such as an up-to-date description of rhotacism or fusion phenomena affecting high frequency function words such as the negative bu or the indefinite article yi. The style of the grammar is in fact closer in approach to Chao's A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968) given the plenitude of excursus, formatted in small print in indented paragraphs, intended for those readers who wish to gain more information on a particular topic. Furthermore, the fine attention to detail for the phonetic and prosodic values of the data presented is to be much appreciated and noted as a hallmark of this grammar. The in-depth discussion of important lexical features such as tone sandhi or the neutralisation of tonal values is quite striking in its degree of precision. This feature, combined with the unwavering description of real discourse data, accounts for the great originality of the work. Nonetheless, a minor objection is that some of the chapters suffer from a lack of coherence in thematic matter, for example, the chapter on verbs (Chapter 5) flows into a major presentation of grammatical constructions which surely deserve a chapter in their own right (causative, passive, ditransitive and bǎ constructions inter alia). Yet the same chapter on verbs does not include the topic of resultative verb compounds, nor indicate associated characteristics of verbs such as the possibility of aspectual modification. (These topics are, it is true, subsequently considered in chapter 8 on tense, aspect and mood and chapter 10 on morphology but could have been usefully foreshadowed here.) As a consequence, the order of presentation and selection of topics to be discussed in any given chapter is not always transparent, and neither is the issue introduced or commented upon by the author. There are overall, however, more than sufficient meritorious aspects to compensate any such organisational deficiencies. Another minor point regarding the presentation: it is a pity that the Chinese characters are not provided for the indented examples from the corpus of Beijing and Taiwan Mandarin materials. A more detailed look at some of the interesting features of each chapter next follows in the form of a critical overview which weighs up both the pluses and minuses of this very solid and comprehensive grammar. [End Page 213] Chapter 1 Mandarin This is a short introductory chapter on the history behind adopting Mandarin...

Measuring sentence types and complexity of spontaneous discourse productions by Cantonese-speakers with traumatic brain injury in Guangzhou: A pilot study

Measuring sentence types and complexity of spontaneous discourse productions by Cantonese-speakers with traumatic brain injury in Guangzhou: A pilot study

The significance of intercultural understanding in the English modern foreign languages curriculum: a pupil perspective

This study has been prompted by a concern that the term intercultural understanding (IU) has appeared in English curriculum policy texts in order to address macro issues with scant pedagogical attention to its effective implementation at the micro level in the modern foreign languages (MFL) classroom. The article investigates pupils' perceptions about the development of IU in the English Key Stage 3 (Years 7–9) MFL curriculum. It is based on the premise that if we are to develop appropriate intercultural languages pedagogy for this age group (i.e. 11–14), it is vital that we explore and discover the perceptions and experiences of the targeted learners. We present the empirical findings from a questionnaire-based survey (N = 765) and group interviews (N = 5) with Year 9 pupils in different types of state schools (single sex and mixed comprehensive and single sex grammar) in the north west of England. By applying and extending Barrett's SSCM model (2007) we demonstrate how factors such as school type, gender, social background and linguistic capability of the pupils may affect the meaning or level of importance that pupils attach to IU. In light of these findings, we argue that a one-size fits all IU curriculum prescribed from top down is unlikely to be effective in achieving its aims.

Non-canonical grammar in Best Paper award winners in engineering

Non-canonical (NC) grammar from a corpus of 14 Best Paper award winners in software and hardware engineering research published since 2006 in IEEE Transactions is presented and analyzed. Two independent raters, using a standard comprehensive grammar of English as a benchmark, identified the NC usage. Most (co)-authors in the corpus report themselves to be non-native speakers of English (NNSEs), but three of the 14 papers have a self-described native speaker of English as a co-author. The majority of the NC usage falls into patterns which match those reported in spoken English communication among NNSEs. The appearance of simplified grammar (e.g. dropping of articles, lack of concord in number marking between subject and predicate) in published research that has attained Best Paper status in engineering’s most prestigious journals may indicate that the gate-keeper role in engineering now reflects the predominance of non-native speakers in the field. Emailed and personal exchanges with editors and reviewers, and data about the international nature of the engineering industry, are presented to throw light on this phenomenon. The paper closes with advice, based on the corpus analysis and findings, for engineering researchers concerning manuscript preparation, as well as advice on pedagogy for teachers of engineering communication.

The Spanish DELPH-IN grammar

In this article we present a Spanish grammar implemented in the Linguistic Knowledge Builder system and grounded in the theoretical framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The grammar is being developed in an international multilingual context, the DELPH-IN Initiative, contributing to an open-source repository of software and linguistic resources for various Natural Language Processing applications. We will show how we have refined and extended a core grammar, derived from the LinGO Grammar Matrix, to achieve a broad-coverage grammar. The Spanish DELPH-IN grammar is the most comprehensive grammar for Spanish deep processing, and it is being deployed in the construction of a treebank for Spanish of 60,000 sentences based in a technical corpus in the framework of the European project METANET4U (Enhancing the European Linguistic Infrastructure, GA 270893GA; http://www.meta-net.eu/projects/METANET4U/.) and a smaller treebank of about 15,000 sentences based in a corpus from the press.