The Word and Its Ways in English
eBook - ePub

The Word and Its Ways in English

Essays on the Parts of Speech and Person

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Word and Its Ways in English

Essays on the Parts of Speech and Person

About this book

Words are the foundation, the building blocks of language. While an obvious and irreplaceable concept in the minds of non-linguists, the entry "word" does not figure in the indexes of some books on linguistics. Why is there this neglect of the word among many contemporary linguists?

Inspired by the work of the French linguist Gustave Guillaume and the last in a series of books, The Word and Its Ways in English is a study of the way the word is configured in English, and an attempt to discern its nature. Walter Hirtle presents the word as the smallest element of meaning in the brain. He also explores how thoughts in the mind of a speaker become a succession of spoken words that are translated back into meaning in the mind of a listener. He examines different categories of words and how grammatical components such as person, case, and gender contribute to a word’s meaning and are intimately linked to the mind.

A thought-provoking account of the workings of grammar and the semantic notions that underlie grammatical distinctions, The Word and Its Ways in English is essential reading for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the link between language, meaning, and words.

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Yes, you can access The Word and Its Ways in English by Walter Hirtle in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Linguistics. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Copyright
  3. Contents
  4. Preface
  5. Acknowledgments
  6. 1 Language and the Mind
  7. 2 Why the Word?
  8. 3 The Word as a Closed Watch
  9. 4 Person, Space, and Parts of Speech: Exploring with Guillaume
  10. 5 Person, Space, and Parts of Speech in the Noun Phrase
  11. 6 Case as a Grammatical Category in Modern English
  12. 7 Person in the Substantive and the Verb
  13. 8 The Personal Pronouns in English and the Representation of Ordinal Person
  14. Concluding Thoughts
  15. Glossary
  16. Notes
  17. References
  18. Index