Fully updated for 2009, and with a brand-new, user-friendly design, this edition is full of exciting new features to help learners become fluent in English, including cutting-edge software to build vocabulary faster.

Elizabeth M. O'Dowd offers a new, discourse-functional account of the categories "preposition" and "particle" in English. She explains why certain words have membership in both categories, and solves many intriguing puzzles long associated with the syntax and semantics of these words. Based on linguistic data extracted from a series of actual conversations, O'Dowd provides new insights into how prepositions and particles are used, and how their meanings can change across different discourse contexts over time.

To clarify and facilitate our inquiries we need to define a disquotational truth predicate that we are directly licensed to apply not only to our own sentences as we use them now, but also to other speakers' sentences and our own sentences as we used them in the past. The conventional wisdom is that there can be no such truth predicate. For it appears that the only instances of the disquotational pattern that we are directly licensed to accept are those that define "is true" for our own sentences as we use them now. Gary Ebbs shows that this appearance is illusory.

English spelling is extremely complex because it owes so much to other languages. There are rules but unfortunately there are just as many exceptions to the rules. This book has been written in an attempt to help you sort out the problems. It gives examples of spelling variations and lists of frequently misspelled words as well as providing you with some fascinating background information on the origin of certain words.