A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics)
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: August 6, 2005
Language: eng
Number of pages: 512
ISBN-13: 9780199247400
Description: This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say "I wish to go", "I wish that he would go", and" I want to go" but not "I want that he would go."