Shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. This book starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover. It uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of diffe[...]

In Basic Linguistic Theory R. M. W. Dixon provides a new and fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In three clearly written and accessible volumes, he describes how best to go about doing linguistics, the most satis[...]

In the early 1960s, R. M. W. (Bob) Dixon was one of the first linguists to study the Aboriginal languages of northeast Queensland, Australia. He found that some languages of the coastal rainforest were still in daily use, but others were only half-remembered by a single elder. This autobiographical [...]