How reliable are all those stories about the number of Eskimo words for snow? How can lamps, flags, and parrots be libelous? How might Star Trek's Commander Spock react to Noam Chomsky's theories of language? These and many other odd questions are typical topics in this collection of essays that pre[...]

This groundbreaking undergraduate textbook on modern Standard English grammar is the first to be based on the revolutionary advances of the authors' previous work, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002). The analyses defended there are outlined here more briefly, in an engagingly acces[...]