Welcome to Pellissippi Parkway's Look at English Grammar
A Few 'Language Miniatures'
These are few of the many essays to be found at the Language Miniatures web site and reposted by permission here. They are written by William Z. Shetter, a retired university professor of foreign language and linguistics. I recommend all of them, highly. My presentation of a few of them here is meant to whet your appetite for the real site, nearly 150 little gems. The ones I've selected focus on how English functions (with the exception of 121, which shows how English doesn't do something other languages do); the web site ranges far afield from that.
Index:
No. 1 - A Bonehead's Headbone: Noun compounds give a lot of bang for the buck
No. 8 - Is Silence Being Golden?: Our English progressive is difficult
No. 11 - And What's All This?: 'What a word means' is not all that simple
No. 17 - It Really IS Time you Thought: Of the present, the past and the future
No. 19 - British Left Waffles on Falklands: Why do some headlines sound so funny?
No. 23 - The Commonest Word in the Language: The social role of the word 'the'
No. 33 - Understand You Not These Words?: What 400 years can do in a language
No. 121- Are You Reading This?: Imperfective and Perfective aspect
No. 134 - The Orange Juice Seat: Or, the role of context in making sense
All essays Copyright © 1998-2004 by William Z. Shetter
Go to Language Miniatures at http://home.bluemarble.net/~langmin/index.html
Got a question?
Send it to me --
kmdavis@erols.com and I'll answer it.
