Discovering and enjoying phantonyms, gramograms, anagrams and other fascinating word phenomena. Fans of Anguished English and Get Thee to a Punnery will revel in the pages of this rich collection of linguistic acrobatics like palindromes and other fun word combinations, by the authors of The Right Words.
English is a glorious mess of a language, cobbled together from a wide variety of sources and syntaxes, and changing over time with popular usage. Many of the words and usages we embrace as standard and correct today were at first considered slang, impolite, or just plain wrong.
The volume constitutes a state-of-the-art account of issues related to teaching, learning and testing speaking in a second language. It brings together contributions by Polish and international scholars which seek to create links between theory, research and classroom practice, report the findings of studies investigating the impact of linguistic, cognitive and affective factors on the development and use of speaking skills, and provide concrete pedagogic proposals for instruction and assessment in this area
We are living through the consequences of a linguistic revolution. Dramatic linguistic change has left us at the beginning of a new era in the evolution of human language, with repercussions for many individual languages. In this book, David Crystal, one of the world's authorities on language, brings together for the first time the three major trends which he argues have fundamentally altered the world's linguistic ecology: first, the emergence of English as the world's first truly global language; second, the crisis facing huge numbers of languages which are currently endangered or dying; and, third, the radical effect on language of the arrival of Internet technology.
Taking us through cliché, metaphor, analogy, neologism and surrealism, amongst other creative tropes, Tony Veale offers a comprehensive guide to the actual processes behind linguistic creativity. By grounding his approachable examples in easy to replicate methods, the book is perfect as a resource for individual creative exploration. Anyone with an open mind and a computer and a desire to learn about how we creatively say things with words will love this book. Written by an expert in natural language generation, this deceptively simple book offers powerful tools for reconceptualising creativity.
