Why do questions about idioms often leave us "tongue-tied" in our classrooms? This book takes a look at learning and teaching idioms from two perspectives. First is a survey of recent work on learning and teaching idioms from diverse perspectives in the linguistics and educational research literature. The survey includes definitions of…

Taking a different perspective to traditional case studies on one bilingual child, this book discusses the whole family and the realities of life with two or more children and languages. What do we know about the language patterns of children in a growing and evolving bilingual family? Which languages do the siblings prefer to speak to each other?…

This volume offers a wealth of new information about the forms of several speech acts and their social distribution in Vietnamese as L1 and L2, complemented by a chapter on address forms and listener responses. As the first of its kind, the book makes a valuable contribution to the research literature on pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and language…

Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages influence the way we think, what happens to those who…

This unique book emphasizes the importance of supporting students' academic development with targeted vocabulary instruction that includes a wide range of language forms and words. The authors provide sound theory and practical techniques to help teachers bridge the achievement gap by strengthening vocabulary, deepening literacy skills, and…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

This book provides tools to enhance upper-level spelling and vocabulary instruction, and features more than 120 reproducible sorting activities and games. It offers suggestions for helping students build mastery of vowel patterns, syllable structure, syllable stress, consonant and vowel alternations, compound words, prefixes, suffixes, and word…

This book, written in an informal dialogue style, develops the thesis that of all the significant forms of art and communication, language alone has remained bound by an outdated, rigid structure--"command grammar"--that inhibits thought and expression. The book explains how language may be freed through use of Neo-Narrative, an "open structure"…

This volume opens with an examination of the decay that the English language has suffered over the past century and explains the origin and remedy of its two chief menaces: ambiguity and cacophony. The second part of the book illustrates the manner in which speakers and writers misuse language. Chapters include "The Prodigal…

Deliberately pedagogical in its orientation, this book presents the essentials of English structure in a framework derived from modern linguistic theory and in a way that should be comprehensible to beginning students. The book is intended to offer students an understanding of what is involved in the scholarly study of language as they acquire an…

The book, designed as a textbook for introductory study of semantics within college-level linguistics, focuses on the study of meaning as it is systematically encoded in the vocabulary and grammar of natural languages. The term "semantics" is presumed here to include pragmatics. An introductory section explains fundamental theoretical and…

The history of Slavic prosody gives an account of Slavic languages at the time of their differentiation and relates these developments to issues in phonological theory. It is first argued that the syllable structure of Slavic changes before the fall of the jers and suggests that intra- and intersyllabic reorganization in Late Common Slavic was far…

The central thesis of this book is that the laws of traditional "command grammar" are an obstruction to expression and are too difficult for a majority of people to master, as demonstrated by a progressive deterioration in general literacy skills. The book contends that the structure of the sentence is at the source of the present difficulties. It…

The textbook is designed as a self-contained introduction to English syntax, providing an overview of key theoretical concepts and descriptive devices used in contemporary linguistic work rather than a historical perspective and using varieties of English from around the world rather than other languages for illustration. Chapter topics include:…

Learnability theory is an attempt to illuminate the concept of learnability using a mathematical model of learning. Two models of learning of categorial grammars are examined here: the standard model, in which sentences presented to the learner are flat strings of words, and one in which sentences are presented in the form of functor-argument…