A Semantic Approach to English Grammar (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics)

Robert M. W. Dixon

This book shows how grammar helps people communicate and looks at the ways grammar and meaning interrelate. The author starts from the notion that a speaker codes a meaning into grammatical forms which the listener is then able to recover: each word, he shows, has its own meaning and each bit of grammar its own function, their combinations creating and limiting the possibilities for different words. He uncovers a rationale for the varying grammatical properties of different words and in the process explains many facts about English - such as why we can say "I wish to go", "I wish that he would go", and" I want to go" but not "I want that he would go."

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