A dictionary of Mandarin Chinese verbs and adjectives, a companion to a Mandarin grammar, is intended as an extensive teaching lexicon of a major Chinese word class. It catalogues 4,500 words and combinations, with instructions in the proper and various applications of each item through linguistic explanations and illustrative sentences when…

The choice of a reliable authority for use in decisions of grammatical acceptability in English is discussed. It is argued that commonly-heard "rules" of English grammar offer advice that is either prescriptive or proscriptive, not descriptive, and often based on inaccuracies or flawed linguistic analyses. This is illustrated in the case of…